


Perfect Son

by jujubiest



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Bisexual Dean, Character Study, Deanna Winchester - Freeform, Dysfunctional Family, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/F, F/M, Genderbend, Hell Trauma, Het and Slash, Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, Internalized Misogyny, Past Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con, Series Spoilers, Sexism, Slut Shaming, Threats of Rape/Non-Con, effemiphobia, girl!Dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-20
Updated: 2015-11-16
Packaged: 2017-12-27 02:53:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 23,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/973461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jujubiest/pseuds/jujubiest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean Winchester is a pretty far cry from the perfect son, but not for lack of trying. By God, does she ever try.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Four

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically all of my headcanons for girl!Dean Winchester pulled together into a narrative. I pondered how Dean's life and personality might be different if he'd been born a girl. A man of John Winchester's generation, who's lived in cultures as effemiphobic and sexist as the American military in the 60s and then the hunter community, would almost certainly raise a girl differently than a boy. And their family dynamic would be different yet again if Dean were a girl and Sam were a boy, rather than if they were both girls. Then I started to wonder, how would Dean's life play out differently? How would the story change? So this is what I think about that, told in chronological order from the day Mary Winchester died until the day I run out of steam.
> 
> I think it's also worth mentioning that almost everything in here is fucked up and wrong in some way. Dean's attitudes about herself and many of her actions are by no means to be taken as healthy or exemplary. This is not a story about self-aware, progressive, accepting people. This is a story about incredibly damaged, fearful, messed up people with a lot of incorrect ideas about themselves and the world around them.

That's how old she is when her mom dies, pinned to the ceiling and gutted like an animal, mouth agape in a wheezing gasp that should have been a scream as she's engulfed in flames above their heads. She's frozen with terror, unable to look away until her dad scoops her up under one arm and carries her to safety. Her baby brother is crying, but she can't make a sound. She stares up at the house in silence.

When the firemen come to put out the flames, a policeman pulls her dad aside to talk to him. Dad hands Sammy over to her.  He's so little, but he feels heavy. Her arms ache with the effort of holding him after only a minute. She holds tighter, fixes her eyes on Dad and refuses to look away, even when a lady policeman comes to ask her questions, too. She won't say a word to anybody.

It's a long time before she says anything at all.


	2. Six

When Dad leaves her and Sammy at Uncle Bobby's and doesn't come back for months. She wishes she were bigger, stronger, like Dad and Uncle Bobby. She wishes she were a grown-up man so Dad could trust her to look after Sammy while he's out hunting.

She tells Bobby her wish, and Bobby laughs at her a little uncomfortably.

"Well honey, you won't ever grow up to be a man. Girls grow up to be women."

For the first time, it occurs to her that there's one big difference between her and the rest of her family. For the first time she wonders if maybe Dad can't trust her to watch Sammy because she's a girl and not a boy. She wonders if Mom would have lived if she’d been a man instead of a woman.

And what if she'd been a boy? Maybe Dad would've trusted her with Sammy then. What if she could have got Sammy out of the house and Dad could've stayed behind to save Mom?


	3. Eight

Dad ignores it at first, when she demands to be called Dean. He flat refuses. He also refuses to let her cut her hair, or teach her anything about guns or cars or hunting.

"You let Sammy hold a gun! He's still a baby!"

Sammy glares at her, and she rolls her eyes.

"Well, you _are_ ,” she insists to her brother. Turning back to her dad, she pleads, “I'm twice his age, how come you won't teach me anything?"

"Because you're my daughter and I'm doing what's best for you."

It stings like a slap because she hears it for what it is. _Because you're a girl. It's because you're a girl._

She never answers to Deanna again. After a solid month of having to drag her places she won't go when told and meeting a stony wall of silence whenever he addresses her, John gives in, bewildered. She's never been obstinate like this before. He decides if she wants to be called Dean that badly, it can't hurt.

He still hits the roof when he comes home one day to find she's gotten hold of a pair of scissors and cut off all her hair by herself.


	4. Twelve

She finally gets Bobby to stop trying to make her play with dolls and teach her to shoot a rifle instead. She takes to it like a fish to water, and then wheedles him into cars, and knives...all the things John refuses to show her no matter how persistently she begs. All the things Sammy won't teach her either. Maybe he doesn't care about knowing them, but she does. She secretly thinks he likes being John's favorite, and knowing things she doesn't. _Well, shit on that._

She never asks directly about hunting. She knows that would shut Bobby up quicker than a pit of sand in the rainforest. Instead, she asks around it, all the skills she needs to know that he can teach her.

John leaves her at Bobby's all the time. Sometimes he leaves Sammy, too, but most of the time he takes Sammy with him and leaves her behind anyway. She stopped pitching a fit the minute she realized this gave her unfettered access to Bobby's books. She sneaks one at a time out of his library and hides them under her mattress to read after he thinks she's gone to bed. The words inside are terrifying, but what's more terrifying is that she's been walking around in the world for twelve years without knowing exactly what was out there, or how to fight it.

That's what she tells Bobby when he catches her reading about demonic omens at 4 a.m. He sits down on the bed and gives her a long, hard look, before he sighs and asks her what in hell she thinks she's doing. She makes herself look him in the eye as she answers, even though she feels about an inch tall.

"I'm sorry I snuck around, Bobby. But I gotta know. If all this stuff is really out there, I gotta know about it."

"Most people are happier not knowin', kid," he says sadly.

"Well they're idiots," she says truculently, sticking out her chin. "If all this stuff is out there and people don't even know, how're they supposed to keep safe? How'm I supposed to look after myself?"

"You got me 'n your dad to look after you," Bobby starts, but Dean is having none of that.

"Dad was there when it killed Mom," she interrupts softly, eyes falling to the blankets. "She died anyway."

"Kid..." Bobby starts, and then doesn't seem to know what else to say. Dean looks up at him again, green eyes defiant.

"I'm not gonna sit around and wait for someone else to know everything and keep me safe, if it's all the same to you."

Bobby looks like he can't decide whether he's mad or sad, but he doesn't argue anymore, and after that he lets her do what she wants.

The next time John tries to leave without her, she waits until Bobby's asleep and then sneaks out of the house with a duffel bag full of clothes, rock salt, and holy water, and one of Bobby's burner phones. She manages to hitch hike halfway to Washington state in two days before she calls John's number and tells him where she is. When he shows up at the Motel 6 looking ready to smack her one, she squares her shoulders and plants her feet and looks heartbreakingly, unwittingly, just like her mother.

"You can knock the hell out of me and drag me back to Bobby's if you want, but I'll just run away again. I'll run away every single time you try to leave me there. The only way you're gonna know where I'm at is if I'm with you."

John stares at her for a long moment, like Bobby did, except when John stares it doesn't make her want to squirm anymore.

"Fine," he sighs finally. "Get in the car."

Sammy gives her a hug when John isn't looking, and shows her where he carved his initials into the door,  hidden by a flap of fabric so John can't see it. When John leaves them in the motel room that night to do research while he's on a hunt, they sneak out to the Impala with one of Sammy's knives. Dean carves her initials in right beside her brother’s, then sits back and smiles in awe at what she's dared to do. Sammy looks at her with shiny eyes.

"So it's gonna be you 'n me from now on, right Dean?"

"Sammy, the Devil himself couldn't drag me away from you."

Sam hesitates for a second. Then:

"Come on," he whispers excitedly, sliding back out of the car. Dean follows, shutting the door carefully behind her. Sam bounds across the parking lot and into the motel room, running over to his duffel and pulling out something wrapped lumpily in newspaper. Looking shy for a second, he hands it over to Dean, who takes it uncertainly.

"Open it," Sammy says.

"What is it?" Dean asks with not a little wonder. She's never gotten a present before in her life.

"Just...open it, alright?"

Dean does, unwrapping it carefully and letting what's inside fall into the open palm of her hand. It's heavy.

"It's supposed to protect you from bad stuff. Bobby gave it to me last time we were over there," Sam says, voice hushed as if afraid someone might be listening. "He wanted me to give it to Dad, for Christmas, but Dad wasn't around so I got mad and hid it. I was gonna give it to him for Father's Day. Or, y'know...whichever day he bothers to show up for, I guess."

The bitterness in her little brother's voice catches Dean off guard.  She looks up from the bronze amulet--some kind of horned godhead on a black tether--to study her brother's face.

"Sammy," she says slowly, "you realize our dad's a superhero, right?"

"Uh-huh," Sam says sarcastically. "Tell me one I haven't heard, Dean."

"No, really," Dean sinks down onto the bed behind her, voice earnest as she tries to explain to her brother the one thing that makes every other awful thing okay, the one thing he absolutely has to know about their dad.

"He doesn’t go off fighting monsters ‘cause he likes it. He does it so other people can be safe. So nobody else ever has to live without their mom. We have the coolest dad in the world, and he needs this way more than I do." She moves to give it back.

"No," Sam insists. "Dad may help other people, but he lies to me and he's mean to you. That's yours."

Dean puts it on reluctantly, but when it falls against the hollow of her throat she smiles.

"Thanks Sammy," she says. "I love it."


	5. Sixteen

She stops cutting her hair and lets it grow, despite the occasional jab from John. She does everything else he even hints at asking, no matter how often she rankles under his criticism, no matter how much she wants to scream at him that she's not a child. She never lets her internal rebellion--which feels a lot like treason--show, even when she thinks he's being too hard on Sammy. She shuts up, does what she's told, tries to keep the peace. But she flat refuses to cut her hair. John throws up his hands.

"First you won't keep it long, now you won't keep it short. You dress like a slut and you act like a boy. Would you make up your mind?!"

Dean doesn't think a change of heart twice in sixteen years is that much to ask, but she doesn't say that out loud. She stands up under the outburst like she always does and lets it roll off her shoulders. Sammy is a tense ball of righteous preteen indignation at her shoulder, but she lets him know without even looking at him to keep his big mouth shut. She doesn't need her little brother defending her virtue, fuck you very much. Anyway, she doesn't _really_ dress like a slut.

It's just that she's figuring out how the world works, that's all. No matter what she does, no matter how hard she tries, she's never going to be the perfect son. She's always going to be just a girl to John, a girl who can't keep up with the boys. Never mind that she can outrun, outshoot, and out-wrestle Sam. Never mind that she came out of a fight with some asshole at Sammy's last school without a scratch on her while the other kid had two black eyes and needed three stitches in his eyebrow to boot. Never mind that she hasn't cried over a bruise or a scrape since she was eight years old, she's still _just a girl._ She figures she might as well look like one, especially if it helps them get the job done.

People don't talk to John. He freaks them out, with the way he walks like a predator and looks at everything with this dark intensity, like he’s trying to decide whether or not he needs to kill it. People only talk down to Sam, because he's still just a kid, and they like to watch what they say in front of him too, so that's no use. But her? People have been talking to her since she was fourteen, without blinking.

Dean doesn't _look_ sixteen, and she knows it. She revels in it. She's fit, a little too solidly built and broad shouldered to look like the typical girly girl, but still curvy in all the right places. She knows what effect she has on men, and likes it. She takes advantage of it as often as possible, wears her jeans loose and low on her hips and her shirts tight and cut just to _there_. Just enough so they get a glimpse of the goods when she leans in. She doesn't need makeup but she paints her nails dark red, that extra little touch of femininity that puts people at ease without their realizing it. Someone who has time to paint their nails can’t be a threat.

Between her big green eyes and just the suggestion of freckles across her tanned face, she pretty much gets whatever she wants. All she has to do is walk in a room, pick out her target, unzip her jacket and smile.

John hates it, berates her for it constantly. One night she walks out of a bar after half an hour of chatting up a man old enough to be John's father, and he snaps at her, "I didn't raise you to be a whore."

"No," she says, "you raised me to be a hunter." And hands him a slip of paper: a map to the remains they need to salt and burn. He takes it with a scowl and nary a word of praise, but after that he lets her do as she pleases. They get twice the research done in half the time, and the next time John goes out to hunt he takes _both_ his children with him.

They pull up to the woods and John kills the engine. He tells Sammy to wait in the car and motions for Dean to follow him. Dean gets out of the car, feeling an adrenaline rush so powerful she's almost dizzy with it.

Dean's first real hunt. It's terrifying, but John's trust in allowing her along is exhilarating. They track down the werewolf that's been chewing on the locals and Dean puts a silver-tipped arrow through its heart with a crossbow. John actually whoops.

"That's my girl!"

It's the proudest moment of her life so far.

They drag the body into the woods together and burn it to a crisp while Sammy waits in the car. Dean sits there and looks into the fire, smelling the acrid smoke and thinking. _I’m sixteen years old. Kids my age are worried about pimples and prom dates while I’m seeing things they'll never even know, never even dream of._

After that it's like a drug to her, the hunt, the kill, and her dad’s looks of bemused pride. That bemusement quickly fades into expectation, certainty and _trust_. Dean treasures that trust like nothing else she has ever possessed. She stops agreeing with Sammy when he back-talks Dad. When he tells her he wants to play soccer, she gapes at him like a fish.

"Soccer? The hell you wanna play soccer for, Sammy? Anyway, when'd you have time? We got work to do."


	6. Seventeen

She loses her virginity--whatever that means--to one of the guys she hustled at pool while she and Dad were taking a break from a hunt to make a little cash to fill the gas tank. His name is Robb. He's probably pushing forty, but he's nice and pretty good-looking in an older-man kind of way. Dean decides that she likes sex. It's fun, and it’s easy. It's also the only place her confidence has ever been admired instead of deemed useful, but unfit for her gender.

She doesn't tell Sammy, and she definitely doesn't tell her dad, although she suspects he might know. A week later he gives her a fake ID that says she's 21, then takes her to a bar and buys them each a glass of scotch. She takes hers down without coughing, and he looks so _proud_ again. That night becomes one of her best memories, far more important than Robb or what they did together.


	7. Twenty

For the first time in years, she feels the need to get away from her family and clear her head a little. Dad lets her go without protest; he knows she'll be back, the trust between them is absolute. With Sam things are a little shaky; he makes her promise over and over. She probably should see what he's thinking then, but she doesn't. Two years from now his departure will still hit her like a bag of bricks.

She hotwires a Camaro--it's no Impala, but it'll have to do--and drives west while her dad and brother head south. They'll be in Florida clearing up some business with a banshee, then meet her in Ohio when they're done. That gives her five days to explore the world on her own. She decides to see five states, but she ends up spending all her time in Cicero, Indiana.

Lisa Braeden is a yoga teacher. She has big eyes, long dark hair, and a smile that does things to Dean's insides that she doesn't understand. And it's funny, she's only ever hit on men before; she never even gave other women a second thought.

After spending the three bendiest days of her life in Lisa's loft, Dean wonders why on Earth she never thought to go for women.

She doesn't tell Sam or Dad any of that, though. Nothing has ever been said, but for all that her life’s foundations are more or less sinking sand, she still knows where the lines in that sand are drawn. She spent far too long earning Dad’s trust to just blow it on something as silly as sex with the wrong people. Anyway, it's not like it'll ever be a problem. She doesn't stay in one place long enough for anybody to get attached, or to feel anything more than passing interest herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lisa will sadly not show up again in this 'verse (I love her though), and Ben Braeden does not exist in it. Why? Well first of all, because my headcanon is and has always been that Lisa lied through her teeth about Ben's father. Dean Winchester was Ben Braeden's biological father, but Deanna Winchester is not physically capable of getting Lisa pregnant, so...no Ben.
> 
> And because there's no Ben, there would be nothing to draw Dean's thoughts toward Lisa over and over. Though I do believe Dean cared about Lisa, I do not believe she was his "dream girl" or that he was deeply in love with her. I believe the main draw once he reconnected with her in season three was Ben, and the prospect of fatherhood and family...both of which have always been big things for Dean anyway. Without Ben, I don't think my Dean would have gone back to Lisa after the events of "The Kids Are Alright," which would have played out differently in any case and probably wouldn't have involved her at all given that she didn't have a kid.


	8. Twenty-Two

She should have known this was gonna happen. She should’ve been able to stop it, or at least stop the giant fight that’s broken her family in half. She knew Sammy wasn’t really happy, knew he didn’t take to hunting the way she did. There was that time he ran away, the way he really wanted to stay at that one school longer…all kinds of signs and she _missed_ them. He and Dad haven’t gotten along since he was thirteen or fourteen, and he was mad at Dad long before that.

 _I_ saw _it. Didn’t I? Why didn’t I do anything?_

Sam is gone. He’s hopped a bus to California to go to college, and after what he and Dad said to each other, Dean doesn’t think Sam’ll ever come back. Dad is on a bender like she’s never seen before, and she doesn’t know what to do.

She knows what to do even less when she wakes up to an empty motel room. The car’s gone, and there’s a message on her phone.

“I’m gone to get your brother. Back in a few days.”

When he does come back, Sam is nowhere to be seen. Dad gets out and slams the door of the Impala so hard it makes Dean wince. He pushes past her into the hotel room and throws his duffel on the unclaimed bed. He just stands there, _staring_ at it. Dean is afraid to move.

“Saw your brother,” Dad finally grunts. Dean doesn’t reply. She waits.

“He looked okay. Real happy, actually. Was laughin’ at a table with a bunch of other kids his age. Already made friends. He was always good with people.”

His voice is suspiciously gruff. He clears his throat.

“Dean,” he says, “I’m sorry. This is not the life I wanted for you. You know you can get out of it, any time you want. You don’t have to be a hunter to be my kid.”

Dean doesn’t know what to say, at first. She doesn’t know what to do with the fact that Sam isn’t coming back, that Dad _saw_ him but didn’t make him come home. _Did you even talk to him?_

“Dad,” she chokes out finally. “I happen to _like_ being a hunter.”

Her dad chuckles, and it’s the saddest sound Dean has ever heard.

“I know,” he says. “Sorry about that.”


	9. Twenty-Four

Cassie Robinson is the architect of Dean’s personal hell. She’s beautiful. She’s intelligent. She’s angry, too, deep down at her core, and although Dean doesn’t know what she’s angry _about,_ she certainly relates to the sentiment.

Dean only talks to her at first because she’s working a case at Ohio University. Cassie happens to be one of many students she questions that day. But the next day, Dean goes back to the student center and finds her again, for no real reason except to talk to her some more. She comes back again the _next_ day as well, even though Cassie will barely speak to her and regards her with complete suspicion and not a little dislike.

She finishes the job within a week but stays two, thankful that Dad isn’t around for this one. She scours local newspapers for the possibility of a job nearby and lucks out once, twice, four times before she has to go more than a full day’s drive to justify her continued stasis. Her routes always seems to criss cross over Athens, Ohio. She tells herself it’s a convenient place to stop and rest between jobs. She runs into Cassie in the student center a few more times, tries to start a conversation. Tries to make her laugh.

Cassie remains a molten core of fury wrapped in a prickly outer shell that rebuffs Dean at every turn until her brain is running in circles like a mad dog, practically _howling_ for just a second of Cassie’s attention. When she finally gets it, it’s not exactly what she was hoping for.

“You know, I don’t get you, Dean,” Cassie bursts out at her one night. “You pull into town and hang around asking people weird questions, you drive off every few days in that old black muscle car that just _screams_ overcompensation. You’re obviously not an idiot but you act like some muscle-bound alpha male trapped in a woman’s body. What is your deal? Why won’t you _leave_ me _alone?!_ ”

Dean kisses her, then gets smacked. Then gets kissed back. It evens out.

She finds out that having Cassie like her isn’t much easier than having Cassie hate her. It’s still prickly and too-hot, and ninety percent of the time she wonders if she’s just become a glutton for punishment. They fight and they fuck, and they’re brilliant at both. It’s everything else they find difficult, the sharing of feelings and the honesty.

Dean’s half out of her mind in love, though, so she decides to give it a try anyway. She hates lying to Cassie, making excuses for what she does and where she goes. She’s never wanted to be honest with someone so much in her entire life, never wanted someone to _know_ her, really know her whole story and love that, and not the lie. So when the jobs within a day’s drive finally run out and she knows she’s going to have to leave for a lot longer this time, Dean tries, voice wavering and hands shaking, to tell Cassie the truth.

Too bad Cassie thinks she’s a lunatic afterward. Dean leaves Athens, Ohio in a cloud of oily black smoke and bitter regret, and she is _never_ making that mistake again. Never. She’s not built for the All-American Apple Pie Life, not even the strange Sapphic interpretation of she'd almost had with Cassie; people like her are better off keeping their distance, staying unattached.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coming soon: Dean shows up at Sam's apartment in Palo Alto to ask him to help look for their dad. She can't believe her little brother is taller than she is.


	10. Twenty-Six

_Nine Years Ago_

Truth be told, it’s the last place Dean wants to be, the last person she wants to go to for help. Things haven’t been great between her and Sammy since he left. At first she tried to call him, but the longer he was gone it seemed the less they had in common. Then again, they haven’t been on the same page for years, not since Dean somehow became Dad’s protégé while Sam was relegated to black sheep status by his obvious and vehement desire for a "normal life."

 _I should’ve stood up for him more,_ she thinks bitterly. But then again, why’d he have to go civilian all of a sudden? They were partners, once upon a time. They stood shoulder to shoulder behind their dad, and occasionally against him. Sammy was the only person Dean felt right with, the only person who never judged her or told her to act like a real girl. Even when he started to acknowledge how useful she could be, John never gave her a moment like that night in the woods with the werewolf again. He never stopped treating it like a backhanded compliment. She was a damn good hunter, for a girl. _Couldn’t have asked for a better son_ , said with throaty laughter and gleaming teeth. A sick feeling in her gut that she ignored because she so desperately wanted it to be the praise and the pride her skills had earned in the beginning.

Meanwhile Sam wanted to play soccer, and Dean had teased him for it relentlessly. Meanwhile Sam refused to cut his hair, and Dean had laughed when John said he might have a daughter after all. Meanwhile they confided in each other less and less, until Dean was unprepared for the final argument that sent her baby brother careening out the front door and into the world without even a glance backward. John wasn’t surprised, so why was she? She was supposed to know Sammy better than John. She was supposed to know him better than _anyone._

She tried to visit him at school once, but he said not to bother, it was finals week and he was too busy. She tried again at Christmas, but he said not to take the trouble; the world still needed saving and it’s not like they ever really celebrated Christmas anyway. Apparently, exchanging stolen gifts in a dark hotel room while John was out hunting and _It's A Wonderful Life_ played on mute in the background didn't count. Dean didn’t try again after that. She stopped calling. If he noticed, he didn’t bother to pick up the phone and remedy the situation.

It’s been two years since they spoke last, and that thought makes her simmer with rage because for all Sam knows, she and John could be _dead_. Salted, burned to ashes, and buried, or _worse,_ and he wouldn’t even have a clue. Would he even care?

Dean reaches forward, turning Led Zeppelin up louder, loud enough to drown out her own furious thoughts.

* * *

 

She arrives just as the sun is setting, and parks the car under the shade of some trees near the end of the block where she knows Sam’s been living for the past year and a half. Just because they don’t talk doesn’t mean she’d ever lose track of the little shit.

She shakes her head when she sees Sam come home around midnight, laughing with his arm wrapped around a petite blonde girl who clings to his side like she might float away if they allow any airspace between them. Dean rolls her eyes, annoyed, at the way Sam walks right up and unlocks the door, opens it, and goes inside with the girl without even looking left or right, without a glance over his shoulder, without even the cursory attempt to make sure the area is safe. Clearly, the kid’s gone totally soft.

Dean bets she can get into that flimsy little California tiki hut without even bringing out the heavy-duty lockpicking kit. She slides a small penknife from the duffel in the passenger’s seat and slips it into her front left pants pocket, slides out of the car, and shuts the door as quietly as she can manage. She’s down the sidewalk, up the steps, and through one of the side windows with a flick of the knife, quick as a shadow and twice as quiet.

She does make a little noise once she's inside, if only to give Sam a chance to prove he isn't a  _total_ civilian. By the time Sam storms into the room with a baseball bat in hand, she’s sitting pretty at the little kitchen table, legs crossed and elbows propped on the scratched surface with a glass of whiskey in one hand and a gun in the other, cocked and pointed directly at his chest.

“Rise ‘n shine, Sammy,” she says musically.

“Dean?! What’re you doing here?” He lowers the bat and she tucks the gun back into the waistband of her jeans, raising her glass with a grin.

“Got thirsty,” she teases. "Man, Sam, you're gettin' a little rusty. I coulda robbed this place blind and you would've just kept snoring."

“Dean,” Sam says again, in a truly horrible approximation of John Winchester’s I-mean-business-boy voice. “What the _hell_ are you doing here?”

Dean sits up and uncrosses her legs, leaning forward a little.

“Okay, all right,” she says, trying to keep the bravado in her voice. If Sam doesn’t help her with this, are they even a family anymore? “We need to talk.”

“It’s called a phone,” Sam says, voice lifting at the end as if it’s a question. Clearly the kid’s been in California too damn long.

“If I’d’ve called, would you’ve picked up?”

Before Sam thinks up an answer to that, there’s a rustling from the darkness in the hallway, and a soft, sleep-muffled voice calls out.

“Sam? Who’s—“

“Jess, hey,” Sam says, straightening his shoulders and softening his expression as he turns to the newcomer and pulls her protectively against his side with one arm. If Dean were just a few years younger, she would make a very audible gagging noise. “Dean, this is my girlfriend, Jessica.”

Dean grins tightly, attempting to work out in her mind how her geek kid brother managed to get a girl like this to even look his way. Sure, she supposes he’s a sweet kid…but he’s also about six and a half feet of gangly awkward doofus, and she’s seen that doofus try to dance. It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.

“Wait,” says the ridiculously pretty girl, “Your sister, Deanna?” Dean’s smile fades.

“Dean,” she says. “Nice shirt,” she nods at the Smurfs t-shirt Jessica is wearing, earning her a smile. “You know,” she says, grinning, “I gotta tell you…you are completely out of my brother’s league.”

“Oh, I know,” she says lightly. “So does he.” She rewards Dean’s cheeky grin with a smirk of her own, earning her a stony glare from Sam. Dean clears her throat.

“Well, it’s great to meet you, Jessica, but I gotta borrow your boyfriend here. Talk about some private family business.”

“No,” Sam speaks up. His face is set in its stubbornest lines, and he makes a big show of throwing his doofus arm across Jessica's shoulders. Dean barely manages to refrain from rolling her eyes. _It must be love._

“Whatever you want to say,” he says, chin jutting out and voice sounding entirely too self-righteous to be allowed, “you can say it in front of her.”

Dean _does_ roll her eyes.

“Okay, fine,” she says. “Um…Dad hasn’t been home in a few days.”

Sam sighs.

“So he’s working overtime on a Miller Time shift. He’ll stumble back in sooner or later.”

Dean wants to punch her brother in his smug, holier-than-thou face. _What_ happened _to you?_ How is this the same kid who used to know Dean so well he could communicate with her across a darkened room with a widening of the eyes or a single jerk of his head? Does Sam actually think Dean would run crying to him for help just because Dad went off on a bender?

_Guess you’re too good for us now, huh, Sammy? Now that you’re a college boy with your perfect girlfriend and your yuppies-in-training apartment. Dad’s a drunk and I’m an embarrassment, is that it? Well, fuck you. See how you like this._

“Dad,” she says carefully, meting out careful emphasis with every word, “is on a hunting trip. And he hasn’t been home in a few days.”

She tries not to enjoy watching his face fall _too_ much.


	11. Twenty-Eight

Dean sits on a low wooden stool, elbows propped on her knees and hands dangling uselessly at the wrists. She can't seem to lift her head. By now she thinks she could have counted every speck of dirt on the filthy floor of this hollowed-out shell of a building. It was once a hunting cabin, maybe. Now it smells like desertion and, increasingly, like death. She breathes through her mouth until she's convinced she can actually taste it, and that's so much worse.

Bobby left, reluctantly, some unfathomable length of time ago. If she had any emotions to spare she would feel bad about the way she'd yelled at him. As it is, she feels nothing beyond the white noise of pain pounding behind her eyelids. Her eyes won't let her cry. They prick and sting like her tear ducts are pouring sand instead of salt water. It feels like she's been here for days, maybe decades. Like she'll be here forever, stuck in this moment. Time can't move forward. Time stopped when Sam stopped breathing in her arms.

She stares at him, lying there, stretched out and cold. She will never understand how anyone could think death looks peaceful; death is not peaceful. Sam's death was quick, but violent. A moment of mercy that got him quite literally stabbed in the back. Sinking to the ground, mouth open, eyes already losing their light by the time she reached him. Head lolling atop his shoulders, gaze unfocused. He couldn't even look at her, she's not sure he could see her at all. But she held him anyway, held all six foot four of him close and prayed to things she didn't even believe in for the strength to somehow keep him together. She felt it the moment he left her.

His face is blank. There's no peace there, no illusion of sleep. Sam is  _gone._ And Dean, for the first time in her relatively short life, has no idea what she's supposed to do. 

"You know," she  mumbles, "when we were little, I kinda hated you sometimes. Wasn't your fault, you didn't do anything...I just...I wanted so bad for Dad to keep me around, to teach me stuff like he taught you. I wanted him to trust me." She took a breath that hurt.

"You were like my best friend once. Always had my back. Stood up for me with dad. You 'n' me against the world, right? Man, I was so mad when you took off. Felt like you abandoned me...abandoned _us._ Your family. You know Dad gave me the car right after you left? I was so mad, at both of you. It felt like he did it to spite you. It wasn't bad enough you got to be the son...you had to go and take my claim to fame, too?  _I_ was the disappointment in this family, Sam! That was  _my_ job, not yours!"

She's half-shouting at her brother's lifeless body, and her throat closes up around the noise like it's reminding her to show some respect for the dead. She gasps, coughs. Presses the heels of both hands to her eyes and tries to push in the aching that's spreading all over her, the cold throb of anger that isn't right, isn't fair. When she speaks again, her voice is quiet.

"I used to ask you what happened like it was somethin' you did, but I know it was me. It's like once I got what I wanted I was so scared to lose it...I'm sorry, Sammy." Her voice falls to a broken whisper. "I'm so, so sorry. This is all my fault. Maybe if I'd stood up for you more. Maybe if I wasn't always so ready to ask how high when Dad said jump. Maybe if I hadn't let things get so messed up between us...I don't know."

She stops. Breathes, in and out. Feels the anger building itself back up with every inhale. First John, now Sam? Why should she be the only survivor? She's not strong enough for this, fight-the-good-fight, keep-on-keepin'-on. She doesn't want to do it all alone. She feels like a whiny child and she  _hates_ this. She would give anything,  _anything,_ to switch places with Sam right now.

The thought freezes her, catches the breath in her throat.

She could do it. It's been done before. Hell, it's practically a Winchester Family Tradition by now. The only reason she's even sitting here, taking up space, is that John made a deal to save her. She could do the same for Sam. She could...

Dean raises her head to look into Sam's face, searching for...something. Resolve, maybe? The hint that he might forgive her for what she's contemplating? His features stay blank, empty of life, of _Sam_. She can't even conjure up a memory of another expression right now. It twists her stomach and steels her nerves. She stands.

"Y'know, I've been a lousy excuse for a sister, and 'm'sorry. But I'm gonna make it up to you. And you'll find out, sooner or later, 'cause you're a nosy little fucker and smart as hell...and maybe you'll be pissed when you do." She pauses. Deep breath.

"But what else am I supposed to do, Sammy?"

Her brother gives no answer. She closes her eyes to the sight of his lifeless body and turns to go. She has a demon to summon.


	12. Twenty-Nine

There's a familiar feel to the air: like being stuck under a thundercloud just before the bottom falls out, the heat-lightning prickle that raises the fine hairs all along her arms. Dean suppresses a shiver and plants her feet, wondering for the umpteenth time whether this wasn't the worst idea she's ever had.

"You sure you did the ritual right?" She asks Bobby needlessly; she can feel that he did. Something is circling above their heads, just waiting to touch down. Her stomach clenches. Bobby shoots her an unimpressed look.

"Sorry," she says. "Touchy, huh?"

Before Bobby can respond, the warehouse comes alive, rattling as though shaken by a giant's hand. Dean grips her shotgun and backs up, closer to the inner wall.  _Hope one or two of these protection spells is worth a damn._

"Wishful thinking," she calls to Bobby over the din. "Maybe it's just the wind?"

As if on cue, the doors are blown open, nearly off their hinges. Dean braces herself for whatever monstrosity will enter.

A shadow moves into the dim light of the warehouse. Resolves itself into a man. An ordinary-looking man in a cheap business suit and a badly-fitted tan trench coat. The lights blow one by one as he passes under them, showering sparks down around him that he ignores, completely unfazed. His eyes find Dean's and lock there, transfixing blue that seems to be searching underneath her skin. The thunder-lightning smell he brings with him reminds her of the first breath of air when she clawed her way out of her own untimely grave. She tightens the grip on her gun till her knuckles ache.

Whatever it is, it's not human anymore. Dean takes aim and opens fire, hearing Bobby do the same beside her. The bullets and rock salt hit their target like a brick wall, but they don't stop him. They don't even slow his pace. Dean switches the gun for Ruby's knife, holding it surreptitiously behind her back as the creature that dragged her from Hell approaches her.

"Who are you?" She demands. It fixes her with an indecipherable stare and answers. Its clear, careful voice falls quietly into the silence, matter-of-fact and yet ringing with an almost righteous authority, deep and rough like it's been dragged over gravel and glass. Its words wrap her insides with a cold, confirming dread.

"I'm the one who gripped you tight and raised you from perdition."

"Yeah," Dean husks out, "Thanks for that." She steps forward, right into this thing's space, and plunges the knife into its chest without hesitation.

It looks down. Then up. She almost imagines there's a hint of exasperated amusement playing at the corners of its mouth as it wraps a hand around the knife and casually pulls it out without any signs of pain, allowing it to clatter uselessly to the floor. Dean staggers back a step, unable to quite comprehend what she just witnessed. Nothing had ever walked away from the point of that knife before. She watches with a numb panic as Bobby lunges at the thing from behind. It grabs his weapon without even looking, swinging the old man around and pressing two fingers, almost gently, to his forehead. Dean's eyes go wide with horror as Bobby crumples soundlessly to the warehouse floor.

Then the creature's attention is back on her, without missing a beat.

"We need to talk, Dean," it says. "Alone."

Dean glares at the thing as she crouches to check Bobby's pulse. It's there, and steady.

"Your friend's alive," the thing says to her, all serenity.

"Who are you?" She snaps, standing slowly.

"Castiel," it says simply, leafing idly through one of the books from which they'd taken their protective glyphs. Dean figured that much.

"I mean," she said, with a calmness and patience she certainly didn't feel, " _what_ are you?"

Castiel turns to her. "I'm an Angel of the Lord."

Dean actually scoffs. Audibly. "Get the hell outta hear," she says. "There's no such thing."

"This is your problem, Dean," gravel voice low, without rancor, long-suffering. "You have no faith." It--he--turns to face Dean, so that his back is to the warehouse wall.

Lightning flashes, from everywhere and nowhere, and Dean's eyes go wide at the shadows it reveals: a huge pair of wings, extending from the man's shoulders and across the entire wall of the warehouse. Each one looks to be at least twice as long as he is tall. Dean swallows, hard. Anger swirls in her gut like acid.

"Some angel you are," she all but growls. "Burnin' out that poor woman's eyes."

"I warned her not to spy on my true form," Castiel says. "It can be...overwhelming to humans, as can my real voice. But you already knew that."

Dean gapes like a fish for a moment.

"You mean...at the gas station? And the motel? That was you... _talking?_ " Castiel merely nods.

"Buddy, next time lower the volume," Dean snarks. She feels some of the feeling coming back to her legs. Whatever this thing is, whatever  _Castiel's_ agenda, he doesn't seem inclined to kill her outright. At least not right now. She relaxes, just a bit.

"That was my mistake," Castiel is saying. "Certain people, special people, can perceive my true visage. I thought you would be one of them. I was wrong."

It makes her feel inexplicably defensive, and like an idiot for feeling that way. "So what  _visage_ are you in now, huh?" She snaps at him. "Holy tax accountant?"

"This?" Castiel looks down at the body he's wearing, gesturing as though it's an outfit he threw on that morning without much thought. _Which is probably not that far off the mark,_ Dean thinks, feeling sick.

"This is a vessel," Castiel confirms.

"You're possessing some poor bastard?" She tenses again, wary. Only one thing she knows of possesses humans.

"He's a devout man," Castiel says, as though that should explain everything. "He actually prayed for this."

Dean snorts. "Yeah...I'm not buyin' what you're sellin'. I'll ask again: who are you really?"

Castiel frowns as though he doesn't understand. "I told you." Still matter-of-fact, as though it should all be so obvious. He talks like he's used to everyone taking his word as absolute gospel. Which probably, he is. Dean _really_ wants to gank this fucker.

"Okay, so tell me this, then, smartass: why would an angel rescue  _me_ from Hell?"

Castiel looks at her steadily. She looks back, determined not to be the one who blinks first.

"Good things do happen, Dean," he says. Dean smirks.

"Not in my experience."

Castiel steps forward at that, into _her_ space this time. He tilts his head, somehow managing to look up at her even though he has a good three or four inches on her, at least. When he speaks, his voice is almost gentle.

"What's the matter?" He says. "You don't think you deserve to be saved?"

Dean reels inside, stays stock still outside. Her jaw clenches. She blinks.

"Why'd you do it," she asks, voice thick.

"Because God commanded it," says Castiel, all gentleness abruptly gone. His words are laden once more with a righteous certainty Dean both envies and hates, eyes alight with religious fervor. "Because we have work for you."


	13. Thirty: Anna

Anna Milton is sweet, and fragile, just a nice girl from a small town going to school for journalism. She also happens to hear the voices of angels, and if that--a perfectly nice, ordinary girl who never hurt anyone being driven over the edge by a constant line into Angel Radio--doesn't prove that God had a sick sense of humor, Dean wonders what the hell else would do it.

Of course, a day and change later Anna turns out to be a fallen angel, and through the shock of having her worldview rocked yet again, Dean thinks she may like her more for that small detail.

What she doesn't understand is why on God's green Earth, no pun intended, Anna would want to have anything to do with humanity. For all that Dean's always waxing truculently defensive about her own species' right to survive, her first-hand experience with life has been less than stellar: blood, death, darkness, and pain. Why would an angel want to subject themselves to all of that?

She should probably have expected, after her limited interaction with Cas and his dicks-with-wings-on-parade band of brothers, that Anna's approach would be obnoxiously zen and glass-half-full.

"There's loyalty," Anna tells her. "Forgiveness."

"Pain," Dean counters.

"Chocolate cake," Anna shoots back.

"Guilt." Dean thinks she has it nailed on that one.

"Sex," says Anna. Dean tries and fails to suppress a grin.

"Yeah, you got me there," she says, but her heart's not quite in it. Anna must sense that, because she steps closer, looking up at her, face earnest.

"I mean it. Every emotion, Dean. Even the bad ones. It's why I fell." She looks away, wistful. "It's why I'd give anything not to have to go back. Anything."

"Feelings are overrated, if you ask me," Dean says.

"Beats being an angel." The bitterness in Anna's voice is surprising, sharper than anything Dean's seen from her so far. She still looks so small, so pale and breakable. It's hard to believe there's an ageless being of pure energy and power living behind her eyes.

"How's that possible?" Dean questions her, really wanting to understand. "You guys are powerful, and perfect. You don't doubt yourselves, or God, or  _anything._ "

"Perfect," Anna scoffs. "Like a marble statue. Cold...no choice, only obedience." Anna turns her head to pin Dean with her eyes, an unspoken challenge in her tone. "Dean, do you know how many angels have actually  _seen_ God? Seen his face?"

Dean shrugs. "All of you?"

"Four angels. Four. And I'm not one of them."

That brings Dean up short. "That's it? Well then how do you even know that there  _is_ a God?"

"We have to take it on faith," Anna says. "Which we're killed if we don't have."

Dean doesn't know what to say to that. She feels like an ignorant child, talking about how bad she's got it to someone who's lived an existence longer than several generations of her family, under threat of death for not _believing_ hard enough. Anna continues, seemingly oblivious to Dean's apologetic discomfort, pouring her frustration into the silence between them.

"I was stationed on earth for two thousand years, just...watching...silent, invisible. Out on the road, sick for home...waiting on orders from an unknowable father I can't begin to understand."

And suddenly, they're on common ground. Dean suppresses a mirthless laugh; it isn't funny, not really. It's ironic, though, that she of all people could look at an angel and say to her "I know how you feel."

She hates it when people say that to her, even when it's true. So she stays quiet, just listening.

* * *

 

Dean wants to scream, or punch something, or both. She forces herself not to clench her fists too tightly around the book she's holding; it's old, and would probably crumble or tear under that kind of pressure. But her hands itch with the kind of restless anger best exorcised by breaking things. They've tried; they've done everything they can do...but they can't save this one, this angel that wanted to be a normal girl, who saw something beautiful in the mess that was humanity...

"Dean." Anna's voice pulls Dean out of the angry swirl inside her brain. She breathes deeply through her nose once and tries to school her expression into something supportive and reassuring before looking up to see Anna's slight frame moving toward her in the blue darkness.

"Hey," she says, "holding up okay?"

"Trying." Anna's voice sounds strained, but there's a calm set to her face that Dean doesn't like. She wonders if Anna's going cold already even without her Grace, the memory of what she once was turning her slowly back into an emotionless statue.

"A little scared, I guess," she admits then, and Dean tries not to take a breath of relief. "So, um...Dean. I just wanted to thank you."

"For what?" Dean asks, incredulous. She hadn't been able to actually  _do_ anything.

"Everything," Anna shrugs, looking out and down at nothing in particular. "You guys...you didn't have to help me--"

"Hey," Dean interrupts, unable to listen to any more. "Let's can the 'thanks for trying' speech, alright? Don't thank me for helping you when I...we couldn't..." she trails off into silence, unable to finish the thought. She's not even sure who the good guys are anymore, but this feels like a battle fought on two fronts, and lost. She's not going to be able to bury this one, not like the others she's failed to save. She's going to dream of Anna's face, she knows it. She's never going to forgive herself for losing this particular fight, and she doesn't even know why it matters so much more than the others. She doesn't think it should, and that just makes it all even worse.

"I don't know," Anna says, sounding very small. "Maybe I don't deserve to be saved."

"Don't talk like that," Dean tells her, frowning. Anna looks up at her, the calm mask from before chased away by uncertainty and sadness, and fear.

"I disobeyed. Lucifer disobeyed. It's our murder one, and I  _knew_ it. Maybe I gotta pay."

"Yeah, well, we've all done things we gotta pay for," Dean mutters, not quite looking her in the eye. What is she doing, breathing the same air as an _angel?_ In particular this angel, who is everything Dean could have ever imagined angels to be, back when she believed they were just nice stories people told each other for comfort.

"I have to tell you something, Dean," Anna says after a moment, mood abruptly shifting back to that discomfiting calm, but with a hint of something else...concern, maybe? "But I don't think you're going to like it."

"Okay," she says warily. "What?"

"About a week ago, I heard the angels talking. About you...what you did in Hell." Dean stiffens, mouth open to cut Anna off right there, but she plows on ahead without giving her a chance.

"Dean, I know. It wasn't your fault. You should forgive yourself." She's stepping close, right up into Dean's personal space, looking up at her with cool blue eyes that promise forgiveness Dean doesn't think she deserves. Not for this.

"Anna," she husks out around the sudden lump in her throat. "I don't...I don't want...I can't talk about that."

"I know," Anna says softly. "But when you can, you have people that want to help. You're not alone, Dean. That's all I'm trying to say."

And then Anna's leaning up, and in, pressing a soft, sweet kiss to Dean's lips that Dean is almost too surprised to return. It only lasts a second, but when they pull apart Dean can feel the warmth rising in her cheeks.

"What was that for?" She has to ask.

"You know," Anna says, almost coy. "Our last night on Earth and all that."

Dean can't suppress the small grin at that. "Oh,  _c'mon,_ " she says indignantly. "You're stealing my best line."

Anna returns the smile and leads Dean by the hand, around to the back door of the Impala. Dean goes willingly, and without thinking too hard. Sure, Sam or Ruby might wander out and see them.  _Let 'em,_ Dean thinks a little savagely. She's not going to let it stop her, not now...not when it really could be Anna's last night on Earth. Hers, too, for that matter, if the angels make good on their threat.

Dean shuts off her brain and just lets herself  _feel,_ and what she feels is that maybe Anna's right...maybe this, these parts of being human, the moments of closeness and warmth and peace...maybe they're worth it after all.


	14. Thirty: Alistair

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for graphic hell-memories, self harm, torture, and talk of rape and sexual abuse/torture. This is a dark chapter, with some horrible stuff going on, especially in Dean's head. You've been warned.

_You ask me to open that door and walk through it, you will not like what walks back out._

Alistair is singing. Singing, and laughing.

Dean keeps her back turned so he can't see her face, struggling to settle her features into something hard, something implacable. Something that can do this and not feel it. She's afraid to let herself feel it again.

"I'm sorry," Alistair says from behind her, his voice a mockery of sympathy. "This is a very serious, very  _emotional_ situation for you. I shouldn't laugh, it's just that...I mean, are they serious? They sent  _you_ to torture me?"

"Tell me who's killing the angels," she says without turning around. Alistair laughs again.

"You think I'll see all your scary toys and spill my guts?"

Dean feels the smile slide across her face, and she lets it. Alistair's not afraid of a little working over. He's going to taunt her and push her buttons until he moves her to recklessness, and then he'll use that against her somehow. She knows his tricks pretty well.  The way she sees it, there's only one way she's going to make him talk. And maybe, just maybe, if she's the one to let the monster out, she can put it back in the bottle once this thing is over and done with.

She hopes.

Dean reaches out a hand and picks up a knife from the cart in front of her. It's not a particularly intimidating weapon, but that doesn't worry her. She learned a thing or two about blades in Hell. It's all in the edge. She glides this one against the pad of her thumb with feather-light pressure and watches the skin split and drops of blood weal. Perfect.

Alistair actually  _cackles_ when she turns around. If he weren't chained with iron to a devil's trap, he'd probably collapse. Her smile widens.  _Laugh while you can, Teach._

"You never did learn to think big," Alistair says, sounding disappointed. "You think I'm gonna talk for a little pig sticker like that?"

Dean slides forward, spine relaxed, limbs held loosely. She slips the edge of the knife across his skin, opening a thin red line, like a papercut. She imagines how it must feel: stinging like fire, and a smart like a bruise at the same time. She feels a rush of something like joy, but so much colder and heavier. It sits in the pit of her stomach, gives her weight and leverage. Her smile opens until it's all bared teeth.

"It's not about the size," she says softly. "It's all in how you use it.  _You_ oughtta know that better than anyone."

"No better than you would, lover," Alistair hisses. Dean barks a laugh.

"Oh yeah, you were a real champ," she says gleefully, reaching up to slide the knife along the tender skin behind his ear. "The only thing more forgettable was the ten-second quarterback at my last high school."

Alistair chuckles maliciously at that. "Oh Dean. I really did a number on you, didn't I. All that false bravado...smells like overcompensation to me." He gives her a grin.

"Your daddy had a good bit of that, too, y'know, but even he started to cry and beg when I got bored of the knifework and bent him over."

Dean freezes. Alistair's grin grows wider.

"I had your pop on my rack for close to a century."

"You can't stall forever, Alistair," Dean tries to cut him off, but the demon just keeps talking. He knows he's found a sore spot and he's going to press it for all it's worth.

"John Winchester. Made a good name for himself downstairs. A  _hundred years._ After each session, I'd make him the same offer I made you: I'd put down my blade if he picked one up."

"Just give me the demon's name," she says, trying to keep the desperation out of her voice. She doesn't want this in her head. She doesn't want it added to the nightmares she has already. Her own are more than enough.

"But he said no, each and every time. Oh, he might scream for me, but damned if I could break him. Pulled out all the stops, but John...he was, well, made of something  _unique._ The stuff of heroes."

Dean wipes the bloody knife with the hem of her shirt and puts it down. She looks hard at her neat little arsenal, looks for the thing that will shut this bastard up.

"And then came Dean. Deanna Winchester. I though I was up against it again."

Dean closes her eyes. Opens them. Clenches her fists, unclenches. Breathes. Remembers the ever-present smell of blood and sulfur, the pain, the begging, the screaming. The feeling of helplessness and endlessness, the resignation...and the moment it all faded away into numbness, and numbness became peace, and peace became  _fun._

She needs to have a little fun, that's all.

"But daddy's little girl, she broke in thirty. Just not the man your daddy wanted you to be, huh, Dean?"

Dean picks up a shot glass and the bottle of holy water.

"Holy water?" Alistair scoffs. "Come on, lover. You're gonna have to get creative to impress me."

Dean doesn't acknowledge the comment. She picks up a syringe and fills it with holy water, presses out the air, and turns.

Forty years. Forty years of torture and dreaming of revenge. Forty years of her soul being twisted and blackened by pain, inflicted upon and inflicting. Forty years of thinking up ever more  _creative_ ways she would make this animal in front of her pay back every moment, every, cut, every twinge.

"Oh believe, me,  _lover_ ," she whispers savagely. "I got a few ideas. Let's get started, shall we?"

* * *

"Who's murdering the angels?" She demands, but she doesn't wait for an answer before she's forcing Alistair's mouth open, pouring pure salt down his throat. It steams and sizzles and he screams and chokes and screams some more, and she isn't even trying to get answers anymore, she doesn't even care who's killing the angels. This is what she needed, this is freedom, this is  _fun._ _  
_

Alistair tries to gargle something out through bloody teeth, and Dean steps back. Let him taunt her some more. It's hilarious to her now. He can't touch her. Those sore spots he keeps jabbing at have gone numb.

"Speak, Teach," Dean snaps. "Or I'll give you another salty surprise."

Alistair spits, blood-and-spit clumped salt on the concrete floor. "You have no idea how bad it really was," he rasps. "What you really did for us."

"Shut up," Dean drawls. "I'm already bored." She fills another container with salt, unconcerned with whatever bullshit he's spouting now.

"The whole bloody thing, Dean. The reason Lilith wanted you there in the first place."

"Learn to do as you're told," she says. She grabs Alistair's chin and forces his mouth back open, drowning whatever he was going to say in a flood of salt. She presses his mouth shut again, lets him try to scream for a few seconds more before releasing him, turning back to her cart as Alistair hacks up his lungs.

"Something caught in my throat," he grates. "I think it's my throat."

"Hope you're not tired yet," Dean says mildly. "I'm just starting to have fun." She skims a hand over her selection, looking for something she hasn't used yet. There are limits to torture on Earth that don't exist in Hell. Quite apart from the number of things that just aren't physically possible here, the human body can only take so much of what _is_ possible, even when it's being inhabited by a demon. And she doesn't want him dead, oh no. She wants these moments between them to  _last._

"You know," Alistair says from behind her, when he's gained enough breath for speech again. "It was supposed to be your father."

Dean is only half-listening, too busy pouring out holy water. She's selected her next game.

"He was supposed to bring it on," Alistair continues. "But in the end, it was you."

"Bring what on?" Dean asks idly, humoring him.

"Every night, the same offer, remember? Same as your father. And finally you said 'sign me up.' Oh, the first time you picked up my razor...the first time you sliced into that weeping bitch..."

Dean turns around, Ruby's knife in hand, blade glistening with holy water and crusted with salt.

"That," Alistair says, leering at her with bloody teeth, "that was the first seal."

Dean goes cold inside, all the way to her bones. The haze of giddy, savage glee she's been existing in for a small eternity evaporates, and she's left with the too-sharp reality of a bare, grimy concrete room, a demon strapped to a Devil's Trap...and the truth of what she's been doing. She swallows back a wave of nausea.

"You're lying," she says, walking closer and lifting the knife as if to use it.

"And it is written that the first seal shall be broken when a righteous man sheds blood in Hell. As he breaks, so shall it break." Alistair recites the words with a kind of fervor Dean would not have expected from him. Her stomach gives a sickening roll. She turns away, lowers the knife.

"We had to break the first seal before any others. Only way to get the dominoes to fall, right? Topple the one at the front of the line."

Dean takes a breath, but it doesn't feel like enough. Her chest feels compressed, she hears the blood pounding in her ears.

"When we win, when we bring on the apocalypse and burn this earth down...we'll owe it all to you, Deanna Winchester."

Dean closes her eyes. It isn't true. She won't believe it.  _Demons lie._

"Believe me, love," Alistair says as though he's read her thoughts, voice low and almost gentle. "I wouldn't lie about this. It's kind of a religious sort of thing with me."

Dean's hands are shaking. She grips Ruby's knife a little tighter, wills herself to calm down. She's going to kill him now, her old teacher and tormentor. But she's not going to do it because she's pissed, or because she likes it. She's going to do it because he's a demon and he needs to die. She's going to do it to stop him from doing to anyone else the awful things he's done to her.

"No...I don't think you're lying," she says, voice sounding hollow to her own ears. "But even if the demons do win, you won't be there to see it."

She turns, and he's there behind her, out of his chains and looming like a nightmare,  _her_ nightmare, every bad dream she's had since she came back. Behind him, she glimpses a gap in the sigils chalked on the floor, smeared and wet with dripping water.

"You should talk to your plumber about the pipes," Alistair snarks merrily, before he takes her down with a single blow.

* * *

 

Everything aches, inside and out. The painkillers are keeping her from staying awake, and the pain is keeping her from getting any rest. She wishes the numbness would come back, and hates herself for wanting it at the same time. She feels sick inside, like she's already half-scorched. _Why did the angels bother to pull me out if I was already mostly demon anyway?_

"Are you alright?" Castiel. Dean cuts her eyes over to see him, looking rumpled as usual, but tired, too, and...sad. She has no room to feel bad for him.

"No thanks to you," she manages to rumble-slur through the painkillers and the rawness of a throat only recently divested of a breathing tube.

"You need to be more careful." Typical angelic prick, blaming everyone else but himself. She hates him.

"You need to learn how to manage a damn devil's trap."

"That's not what I mean," Castiel says, unfazed. "Uriel is dead."

"Was it the demons?" She'd never liked Uriel much, but it sucks to think of him as another one of theirs lost to the bad guys.

"It was disobedience," Castiel says. "He was working against us." His voice is flat, but Dean is starting to learn to pick out the emotions under the monotone. He sounds kind of like she feels right now: hollowed out and hopeless.  


"Is it true?" Demons lie, and she has to know. "Did I break the first seal? Did I start all this?"

"Yes," Castiel says, a million years old and very tired. "When we discovered Lilith's plan for you, we laid siege to Hell and we fought our way to get to you before you--"

"Jump-started the apocalypse," Dean interrupts bitterly.

"And we were too late." It sounds a lot like  _I was too late._

"Why didn't you just leave me there, then?"  _I deserved to be there. I didn't deserve to be saved. It doesn't matter how I ended up there...what I did there...I deserved to rot._  


"It's not blame that falls on you, Dean, it's fate. The righteous man who begins it is the only one who can finish it." He says it with the same reverence Alistair had when he told Dean what she'd done. "You have to stop it."

"Righteous man," she snorts. "Of course. The righteous man is the one who can finish it. Finish _what._ Lucifer?" She hears the angry disbelief in her own voice. "The apocalypse? What does that mean?" She sees Castiel twitch, as if ready to fly.  _No._

"Hey! Don't you go disappearing on me, you sonofabitch. What does that mean?!"

Castiel almost sighs.

"I don't know."

"Bull," Dean spits. Castiel looks at her, defiance and apology, sorrow and uncertainty, exasperation and confession.

"I don't. Dean, they don't tell me much. I know our fate rests with you."

Dean wants to laugh, and she wants to cry. She wants to rewind time and let Alistair kill her for good. She wants to die in a car crash at the age of twenty-seven, maybe go to Heaven even. She wasn't so bad, once upon a time. She wasn't worth much in the grand scheme of things, but she wasn't so bad. Now, she just feels weak, and ruined.

"You guys are screwed," she says. "I can't do it, Cas. It's too big. Alistair...he...I'm not all here. I'm not...I'm not strong enough."

Castiel just watches her. He doesn't argue, and he doesn't fly. Just...looks at her, with sad old eyes and something that burns, something like faith, and she doesn't want to see it.

"I'm not the man either of our dads wanted me to be. Find someone else. It's not me."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phew. I'm glad I got that one over with. I'll be on vacation starting tomorrow night, with limited access to internet and not much time to be on the computer or write, so I may not post another chapter for a while.


	15. Thirty: Adam

Their father had another son.

She didn't want to believe it, but somehow it rang true from the get-go. They did all the tests, of course: silver, salt, holy water, iron. There was no reaction to any of them. Adam is human.

Dean stares down at the photograph of John and Adam, smiling at a baseball game. His fourteenth birthday, Adam says. Dean doesn't even recall her fourteenth birthday, probably because John never marked birthdays or holidays. If they wanted them remembered, Dean and Sam had to do it themselves. That year they apparently hadn't bothered.

And yet John Winchester took  _this_  son to a baseball game for his birthday. He smiled and bought their tickets, and wore a baseball cap and acted like a normal father. Hell, he probably even bought the little bastard some peanuts and cracker jacks.  _And where the hell were we?_

Sam was off at school, by then, Dean guesses. The man never bothered to get out of his car, walk a few yards, and tell Sam he wasn't still mad and that he loved him and he could come home anytime he wanted...but he drove to Minnesota to take some brat kid he didn't even know he had until two years before to a goddamn baseball game.

Dean takes a deep breath, determined not to let her anger at John boil over onto Adam. It's not his fault. She has to remember that. If anything, he's just one more of John Winchester's victims. His mother is missing, probably dead, and it isn't just a random twist of fate. It's because she once meant something to John.

If Dean is less than enthused about the prospect of a half-brother, Sam is a little  _too_ gung-ho about it. He keeps trying to teach Adam things that no wet-behind-the-ears pre-med student should ever need to know: how to clean a gun, how to hold it, how to load it. What kinds of tests to perform on people to make sure they're human. How to end a rougarou with a homemade flame thrower. How to cut himself off from everyone and be alone, transient, a hunter.

Adam takes it all in calmly, though he does look a little pale. His fine-boned hands accomplish the tasks Sam sets them with surgical precision. He'd be a good hunter, with a little training. He would also probably be a really good doctor.

"Sam," Dean says finally, interrupting Sam's diatribe about how Adam can't have any friends. "Can I talk to you?"

Sam gets up and follows Dean to the stairs, out of Adam's earshot. His jaw is already set, stubborn, ready for an argument. Dean sighs.

"What the hell was that?"

"What?" Sam's voice is defensive.

"All that 'hunting is life, you can't have connections' crap! Dad gave you that same speech, remember? Just before you went to Stanford."

"Yeah, so?"

"So? You hated Dad for saying that stuff, and now you're quoting him?"

"Not just him," Sam says pointedly. Dean wants to punch his face.

"Right, so is that what this is? We dumped our shit on you, and you listened to us, and now you wanna do the same thing to this poor kid, too? You didn't get your apple pie life so nobody else does either, is that it?"

"Dean..." Sam sounds as angry as Dean feels, but she watches him reign in his anger, slowly. When he speaks, his voice is controlled.

"You and Dad...you were right. No, listen to me," Sam heads Dean off before she can contradict him. "When I look at Adam, you know what I see?"

"A normal kid," Dean says.

"No," Sam counters. "Meat. Because to the demons and monsters out there, that's all he is. I hated Dad for a long time. Hell, I hated you, too. I did. But now I think I understand. So we didn't have a dog and a white picket fence...so what? Dad did  _right_ by us. You did right by me. We grew up knowing how to protect ourselves. Adam deserves the same."

"Are you kidding me? Sam...look. I'm sorry, okay? I'm sorry for the way we grew up. I'm sorry when you got out, I didn't let you stay out. I shoulda left you at Stanford, found Dad on my own. If I could change it, I would. And I know it's too late for us. This is our life. This is who we are, fine, I accept that. I accept that it's partly my fault. But with Adam...we've got a chance to do better, man. He can go to school. Be a doctor. He can have what we shoulda had. A normal life."

Sam scoffs at her.

"A  _normal life?_ There's no such thing, Dean! I was never gonna have a normal life! Azazel decided that for me before I was even a year old! Ava, Max, Andy...they all had 'normal lives' until he was ready for them. What, d'you think if Dad had decided not to become a hunter, or given us to a normal family, Azazel would've just left me alone? That was never gonna happen! It's not real, Dean!"

"Sam--"

"The dad Adam knew,  _he_ wasn't real! What's real is what we know is out there, waiting in the shadows. The world is coming to an  _end._ That's real. Everything else is just part of the crap people tell themselves to get through the day."

"Adam's not on the demons' radar, Sam!" Dean hates this, the fevered look in Sam's eyes, the controlled tremor in his voice, underlying his words. It's the same righteous, obsessive passion John used to have. It scared her then, and it scares her even more now. She doesn't want her brother to become a monster...but she also doesn't want him to become John. "Please, Sam...he doesn't have to be cursed."

"He's a Winchester," Sam says matter-of-factly. "He's already cursed."

"No." Dean says. She can't believe that. She won't. Whatever she feels about John and the way they were raised, she's not going to let Adam end up like they did. The kid doesn't deserve it. She looks over at him and sees a kid like Sam could've been: sweet, smart, destined for a nice life, if not a terribly adventurous one. She wants that for him. She wants to  _give_  that to him. And she will.

Sam may be hell-bent on turning Adam into a Winchester, but she's going to be the big sister to him that she should have been for Sam.

"Whatever's hunting Adam, I'm gonna find it."

"You already looked everywhere, Dean." Sam says, patient and condescending. She curls her hands into fists.

"Well, then I'll look again."

* * *

 Dean stares at the funeral pyre, the acrid smoke stinging her eyes and making them tear. She had a younger brother named Adam Milligan who she never got to meet. He had a mom named Kate who raised him by herself, got him into college. He had a dad named John who was a mechanic. He was never around much, but he came into town once in awhile, for Adam's birthday, just to spend a day with him, to smile and take him to baseball games. He had a girlfriend, and friends. He was going to school to be a doctor. He never knew he had a brother and a sister who would've fought to save him. She blinks, looks down. Swallows.

"You know," she says to Sam, "I finally get why you and Dad butted heads so much. You two were practically the same person."

She feels Sam looking at her, but she doesn't lift her eyes.

"I mean, I worshipped the guy, you know? I begged him to teach me things, to take me along on hunts. I watched everything he did and tried to be just like him. I listen to the same music, I drive his car. I followed in his footsteps every way I knew how, literally to Hell and back. I used to wish I was a boy 'cause I thought that'd make him happy, make him proud of me. But you were more like him than I will ever be, and I see that now."

"I'll take that as a compliment," Sam says quietly.

"You take it any way you want," Dean shoots back, still not looking at him. She keeps her eyes on the fire, saying goodbye to the brother she never knew and wondering if the brother she grew up with is still there somewhere, behind the eyes of the angry man beside her who drinks demon blood and talks about hunting being life.

After a few minutes, Sam goes to wait in the car. Dean stays until the pyre has burned itself down to smoldering ashes.


	16. Thirty: Jimmy

Jimmy Novak is...a surprise. And a problem. And a question. Dean doesn't like him very much.

He's such a...civilian. How do you spend nine months with an angel stuffed up your ass and still act like a civilian? Dean doesn't get it. And she misses Cas. Cas, who was sneaking around in her head, trying to tell her something important. Cas, who has questions, and doubts. Who sat by her hospital bed and who has a faith in her that she doesn't understand, and fears, and cherishes. She misses the little fucker, and she wants him back.

Which makes her feel guilty as all hell, because after all, Jimmy's  _out._ He's free. It's  _his_ body Cas has been riding around in for nearly a year. His family that's probably been thinking he was dead, or had deserted them. Either way, they've been grieving. Dean should want to get Jimmy to his family as fast as possible, and find a way to hide them from the demons. She should want to keep them all safe and far away from angels.

But she looks at Jimmy's slight, agitated frame and remembers stillness, gravity, the enormous shadow of a pair of wings. He presses his hair as flat as it will go, neatly parted to one side, and it should be messy. His tie is straight when it should be crooked. She hears his voice and it should be deeper, rougher. It should be  _Cas._ She can't help it. She's made exceptions before, shirked duty when it interfered with family. For John. For Sam. Now she wants to do it for Cas as well.

How the hell did she let someone--let alone a freaking _angel--_ dig in that deep?

* * *

Dean can't do much more than watch. She can't tear her eyes away, in fact. Jimmy's little girl, Claire, is  _glowing._ Her eyes are shining a bright, familiar blue. Dean feels it from across the room.  _Cas._ And her insides curl up till she thinks they're about to become her outsides, because this is  _wrong._

Claire is just a child, just a little girl. He can't do this to her. Dean can't believe he  _would_ do this to her. Even though he's an angel. Even though to angels, they're all just vessels and mudmonkeys. Even though there are more important things at stake than the life and well-being of one single little girl. Even though he took this same little girl's father away without a second thought.

But that was before. That was Castiel, Angel of the Lord. _Cas_ is glad when Dean chooses to save a town rather than a seal. Cas was getting too close to the humans in his charge. Cas sneaked into her head to tell her to meet him somewhere they could talk in private. He was going to tell her something, against his orders.

Castiel looks down at the bleeding, dying body of Jimmy Novak through cold blue eyes.

"Please, Castiel," Jimmy gasps. "Me, just take me. Take me, please."

"I want to make sure you understand," says Castiel. Claire's little-girl voice resonates strangely. It reminds Dean, more than anything, of Lilith. She shudders. "You won't die or age. If this last year was painful for you, picture a hundred, a thousand more like it."

"It doesn't matter," Jimmy insists. "You take me. Just take me."

Dean holds her breath. Claire's little blonde head nods once, shortly. "As you wish."

She reaches out her hand to Jimmy's face. Dean has to close her eyes against the bright blue-white glow of Grace. When it fades behind her eyelids, she looks up to see Castiel standing beside her. She stands and watches as Amelia runs to her daughter, looking back to Castiel with a mingled expression of sadness and fear in her eyes. The angel holds her gaze for a moment, then turns as if to go.

"Cas," Dean says hoarsely. "Hold up. What were you gonna tell me?" There are plenty of other things she'd like to ask instead. _Would you really have taken that little girl's life away? Is Jimmy okay in there? Are you still on my side?_ But it's the only thing she can bring herself to say. The answering voice is not what she expected, nothing she could have prepared for. Not quite emotionless. Angry. Resolute. Resentful. It doesn't sound like the voice of the angel she met in a warehouse. It's the voice she's been missing, rough and full of suppressed feeling, but the words it says just make her feel cold.

"I learned my lesson while I was away, Dean. I serve Heaven. I don't serve man, and I certainly don't serve you."

She watches him walk away with a ringing in her ears. Her brother drinks demon blood and her...whatever Cas almost was, is God's bitch again. She's alone on Earth, as usual, caught between Heaven and Hell. She could almost laugh. She could definitely throw up. She drags Sam out of the warehouse, gets in her car, and drives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Egads, this is a hard part of the story to write. The next chapter is going to be a whopper, probably. Not sure when I'll have it up. Most likely not for a while, since it's going to cover a lot of ground as far as the canon goes. Pretty much everything in the season four finale through the first three episodes of season five. None of which is happy stuff, especially if you're in Dean Winchester's head. So yeah...it might be some time.
> 
> However...I have considered writing a few oneshots in this 'verse from other characters' points of view. The ones I'm seriously considering right now are John Winchester, Jo Harvelle, and Sam.


	17. Thirty: The Michael Sword

Dean lays sprawled in a lumpy motel bed between scratchy sheets, indistinguishable from a thousand others she’s slept in, staring up at the ceiling and trying to force her brain to shut up so she can sleep. She’s counted the tiles twice—there are 64—and then the water stains—there are 18, or 19…two of them kind of merge.

She’s been doing this a lot lately—focusing on meaningless details, trying to keep her mind from wandering to other things. Things like Sam trusting Ruby more than her. Or the look on his face when he walked away from her in that hotel room. Or the color of his eyes right before he killed Lilith and freed the Devil.

Or, you know…the fact that her baby brother _freed the fucking Devil._

They’re both out there, now. Somewhere. She sent Sam away. She couldn’t take it; looking at him and wondering if he’s still her brother, if he has her back. If, when push comes to shove, she can trust him. There was a moment in the church when everything felt right, a moment when she and Sam were on the same page for the first time in months. They killed Ruby, finally. Dean’s glad she’s dead. She’s glad Sam helped her do it. But that single moment of clarity doesn’t change the time he spent sneaking out to meet her, learning to use his powers from her, and _drinking her blood._ It makes Dean sick.

And in the days that followed their improbable escape from the newly-risen Lucifer, that moment of synchronicity only served to remind Dean of how far apart they’ve drifted, how wrong things were between them.

It’s been this way for a while, really, even if she didn’t want to see it. She hasn’t trusted Sam since she came back from Hell and found him working with Ruby, and he hasn’t trusted her either. They both saw all of each other’s weaknesses…but apparently, none of their own. And none of their strengths.

Maybe that’s the whole reason they’re in this mess. She doesn’t know; Dean isn’t the figure-it-out of the family. She just knows she had to send Sam away, because she’s afraid that eventually she’s going to end up having to _hunt_ him _,_ and she’s not sure she can do that. Or maybe, deep down, a part of her thinks it’ll be easier, if there’s some distance between them. If she hasn’t seen his face every day for a while.

She doubts it.

So much has happened over the last few weeks. So many people in her life are dead or gone or damaged, and she can’t help but feel like it’s somehow her fault. Maybe if she’d been stronger, or faster, or more…more _righteous…_ maybe Sam wouldn’t be God knows where, practically a demon and being hunted by Lucifer. Maybe he wouldn’t be Lucifer’s one true vessel.

Dean makes a noise, and it’s not a laugh, but it’s not a sob. It’s some hideous marriage of the two, and it hurts her throat on its way out. Her eyes are stinging.

Her brother is Lucifer’s vessel. And she…she’s supposed to be _Michael’s_. She’s supposed to let an angel take control of her body and destroy her little brother. And half the planet with him. It doesn’t feel any more real now than it did the day she found out.

* * *

 

“Oh, thank God,” Dean said sarcastically. “The angels are here.”

“I see you told the demons where the sword is,” Zachariah’s voice grated disparagingly. “And to think…they could have grabbed it any time they wanted. It was right in front of them.”

“What do you mean?” Sam asked, sounding confused. Dean’s jaw tightened, and she guiltily hoped Zachariah wouldn’t answer. The thought of telling Sam too much about anything right now just seemed…dangerous.

“We may have planted that particular piece of prophecy inside Chuck’s skull, but it happened to be true. We did lose the Michael sword. We truly couldn’t find it, until now. You’ve just hand-delivered it to us.”

Dean looked at Zachariah like the idiot he was. “We don’t have anything,” she said, stating the obvious.

Zachariah rolled his eyes.

“It’s you, chucklehead. You’re the Michael sword.”

Dean stared. Beside her, she felt Sam stiffen, heard his sharp intake of breath.

Zachariah, with his typical air of infuriating superiority, just kept spewing improbabilities.

“What, you thought you could actually kill Lucifer? You simpering wad of daddy issues and self-loathing? No. You’re just a human, Dean. And not much of one.”

“What do you mean, _I’m_ the sword,” Dean managed.

“You’re Michael’s weapon,” Zachariah stated, as though it should be obvious. “Or rather, his…receptacle.” He said it with a leer that made her want to be sick. Despite the thinly-veiled innuendo, she knew exactly what he meant.

“I’m a _vessel_?”

“You’re _the_ Vessel. Michael’s vessel.”

“How? Why…why me?”

“Because you’re chosen! It’s a great honor, Dean!” Zachariah sounded as though he actually believed that crap, too. But Dean wasn’t buying. She had seen what happened to Jimmy, had heard him talk about what it felt like.

“Oh yeah, of course. _Huge_ honor,” Dean said sarcastically. She didn’t feel any of that self-loathing Zachariah taunted her about in that moment; it was drowned out completely by the fury thundering in her ears. And the realization was sinking in slowly that they _couldn’t_ kill her. Because Michael was an angel, and angels needed you to say yes. She grinned.

“You know Zach, when I was fantasizing about having an angel inside me, this wasn’t quite what I had in mind. I think I’ll pass, thanks.”

Sam coughed beside her, sounding shocked. Zachariah’s eyes narrowed.

“Joking,” he snarled. “Always joking. Well…no more jokes.”

He pointed a finger at Sam, and Sam crumpled to the floor with a cry of pain and a loud crunch of bone.

“Sammy!” Dean was at her brother’s side in a second. She glared up at Zachariah. “You son of a bitch,” she spat.

“Keep mouthing off, I’ll break more than his legs,” Zachariah threatened. “I am completely and utterly through screwing around. The war has begun. We don’t have our general. That’s bad. Now, Michael is going to take his vessel and lead the final charge against the adversary. You understand me?”

“How many humans die in the crossfire, huh?” Dean demanded, glaring up at Zachariah. “A million? Five? Ten?”

“Probably more,” Zachariah said, sounding unconcerned. “If Lucifer goes unchecked, you know how many die? All of them. He’ll roast the planet alive.”

“Well, I’m guessing Michael needs my consent to ride around in my skin, otherwise you’d have dragged me off already. The answer is no. There’s gotta be another way.”

“There is no other way. There must be a battle. Michael must defeat the serpent. It is written!”

“Answer’s still no,” Dean said through gritted teeth, sliding an arm around Sam’s shoulders.

“Okay, how about this?” Zachariah said, smiling. His tone had gone worryingly reasonable and friendly. “Your friend Bobby is gravely injured. Say yes, and we’ll heal him. If we don’t, he’ll never walk again.”

Dean saw Sam’s head turn toward her, felt his questioning gaze in the corner of her eye. She grimaced.

“No,” she said, feeling like a traitor. But better she betray Bobby than the whole of the human race, right? Even if it didn’t feel that way. She knew what Bobby would say, anyway. He would tell her to keep her damn mouth shut and don’t make any deals on his account, especially not with angels. _Dealin’ with angels is just like dealin’ with demons, ‘cept the demons more or less keep their word._

“Then how about,” Zach said, still smiling, “we heal you from…oh, I dunno…stage-four stomach cancer?”

A stabbing pain lanced through Dean’s stomach. She doubled over, arm falling from Sam’s shoulders to wrap around her stomach. It felt like she was being disemboweled. She coughed, and tasted copper.

“No,” she spat out.

“Then let’s get really creative,” Zachariah said. He sounded like he was genuinely having fun. Dean didn’t think she had ever hated anyone so much in her life.

“Let’s see how Sam does without lungs.”

Dean wrenched her head around to look at Sam, who was already gasping for breath, staring at her with an open mouth and panic-stricken eyes. She made herself turn away.

“Just kill us,” she said. She would gladly die before she said yes to Michael. She hoped Sam felt the same way, because she wasn’t going to do it to save him, either. No more deals to save the people she loved; that was how they’d gotten here.

“Kill you? Oh, no. I’m just getting started.”

Dean braced herself. _Do your worst,_ she thought. She wasn’t going to say yes. It didn’t matter what they did to her. She’d held out for thirty years in Hell; she could take whatever they threw at her in Heaven. She may have given into Alistair, but now that she knew the cost? Now that she felt the guilt of all those tormented souls weighing down on her, every single day? She wouldn’t break, not this time. Not for anything. She smiled up at Zachariah through bloody teeth.

* * *

 

Dean jerks herself fully awake, barely having realized that she’d dozed off. She groans at the ugly ceiling, rubbing her hands over her face. Of course, when she finally manages to fall asleep, she _would_ just end up having nightmares.

She throws the itchy blankets off and sits up, swinging her bare legs over the side of the bed. The sliver of sky showing through the motel room curtains is pale, pre-dawn gray. But there’s no point lying in bed when she can’t sleep. She drags herself to the bathroom, and stands before the mirror for a moment without really registering the reflection in front of her.

The end of her dream is still replaying in her head: the pain, the certainty of a long, horrible death, the knowledge that she was going to let Sam die, too, let Bobby never walk again, and that it felt both right and wrong, and like there was no other option.

And that was when Cas had showed up. Dean decides to do the bullshit noble thing, to let Zachariah torture her and her brother into oblivion rather than say yes to Michael, and there Cas is, pretty as you please. Bright light, angel blade, and everything, looking pissed as hell. Dean can’t remember ever being happier to see anyone.

But…Cas had _died._ Died helping _them_ , of course. And Dean had almost wished she’d just left him alone, to continue being Heaven’s errand boy. It’s not like his sacrifice had meant anything; he’d rebelled, turned on the angels and helped Dean escape their grasp to stop Sam. And Dean had failed. And then Cas had gotten blown to pieces to give them a chance to escape Raphael.

Dean had grieved for him, which surprised her. It surprised her even more, how it felt to see him again, alive and whole. It felt like an answered prayer. And then he turned out to be the answer to another one; he saved their lives and then hid them from the angels.

She remembers the rush of stinging pain through her entire body, there and gone so fast she thought she’d almost imagined it, as Cas carved his sigils on their ribs. That was the second time he had marked her.

Dean lifts her shirt and looks at her torso in the mirror. Beneath her skin, muscles, tendons…her bones are engraved with Enochian, Castiel’s handwriting. She guesses. _Do angels even have handwriting?_

She turns, lifts the sleeve of her t-shirt; the handprint is still there, wide palm and long fingers curling around her bicep. It’s faded slightly, from angry red to pink. In a year or so, it may be gone all together. The thought is strangely unwelcome. She’s gotten used to it. She even kind of thinks it looks cool.

She firmly doesn’t think about the other reasons she might want to keep the mark of Cas’s hand on her body.

Sighing, she turns on the faucet and leans over the sink basin, splashing her face with the cold water to clear the sleep-fog from her brain. Shaking her hands, she reaches for the hand towel hanging on the wall and pats her face dry.

When she looks up, Castiel is there behind her.

“Jesus!” She gasps, starting a little. She glares at him in the mirror. “Don’t do that.”

“Hello Dean,” he replies. She turns around. He’s standing very close—too close, really. Which isn’t really unusual for Cas. He’s always in her space. She used to think it was an angel thing, that they just didn’t understand concepts like a personal bubble…but she’s met other angels who didn’t have this problem, so maybe it’s just a Cas thing.

Then again…she’s never noticed Cas get this up close and personal with Bobby, or Sam. Just her. So maybe it’s a _them_ thing.

She’s pretty much in her underwear, here. And…not that she hasn’t thought about it. But it hardly seems like the time. She swallows.

“I gotta get you a bell,” she says, trying to keep her tone light. Cas just tilts his head to the side, looking confused. She suppresses a smile.

“So you don’t sneak up and scare the crap outta me,” she clarifies.

“Oh,” Cas says. “My apologies.”

“No problem,” Dean says softly. Then she blinks. “Uh…let me go put some pants on, and then you can tell me how you figured out where I was.”

She turns to head back into the main room, and Cas follows, she notes, at a slightly more comfortable distance.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this took longer than I'd hoped, wasn't as long as I'd meant it to be, and doesn't cover all the ground I wanted it to.
> 
> But in the end, it covered the essential stuff: Dean's broken trust in her brother and her growing friendship with Cas.


	18. Thirty: The End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Dean opens her eyes, she knows immediately that something is wrong. The room is cold, and permeated with a mixed smell of sulfur and burning flesh. She sits up and looks around wildly, the gun she keeps stashed under her pillow at the ready in her hands.
> 
> There’s no one there.

She’s a thirty-year-old woman with no home, no job, no real driver’s license, and less than two hundred bucks to her name. She’s tasked with saving the world from evil demons and megalomaniacal angels. And apparently, she’s on a cross-country road trip, on a quest to kill the devil with an angel who’s hell-bent on finding God.

It feels…terrible, and also kinda good. Dean is unmoored. Restless. Free. She can’t hunt like normal, because it would draw the other angels’ attention. She can’t do anything else; she doesn’t know how. Sam was always the books and research guy. So she drives, parks, waits, sleeps. Drives some more. She rolls the windows down and feels cool wind in her hair, turns the music up and sings off-key at the top of her lungs, no one to grimace and complain at her for it. She feels guilty for enjoying herself, even for those stolen moments, while she and Sam are being hunted by angels. Hell, she doesn’t even know where Sam is right now.

But Castiel is here. Which is strange, and good. He’s supposed to be finding God, but he hasn’t left her side for more than an hour at a time since he showed up in her hotel room and talked her into kidnapping an archangel. He hovers nervously in her periphery, enduring her awful singing and what must be a torturously slow method of travel for a being that can fly around the planet in the blink of an eye.

She likes having him there more than she should. She likes thinking that in between flying off to chase down leads he comes back, to sit shotgun in the car with her and not talk and just be next to each other. It occurs to her that he’s the closest thing to a friend she’s ever had.

Sometimes, though, she worries. He looks tired, and she doesn’t think angels are supposed to look tired. He seems sad, and she knows for a fact angels aren’t supposed to feel sad. Once she turns and catches him looking at her with something half like longing and half like fear in his eyes, which turns her hot all over, and then cold, because it reminds her of how Anna looked at her, once, face cast in the shadows of the inside of this very car. She winces away from his gaze and turns up the radio.

There comes a day pretty soon after that when Cas has no more leads to chase down, and Dean doesn’t know what else to drive to. The only weapon that might have stood a chance at accomplishing the impossible task she’s set for herself is long gone by now, whatever Cas insists he’s heard. The world is going to start ending in earnest at some point. She can’t quite bring herself to make it a real vacation and go see the Grand Canyon, though it might be her last chance. Anyway, it’s getting dark. So she rolls up to the Century Hotel, puts the car in park, and looks over at Cas, who’s sat silent next to her this entire time. He turns his head to meet her gaze.

“Why are we stopping?”

“Because I’m human, genius, and I sleep. I need my four hours. We’ll pick up this dead-end search when the sun’s up.”

Castiel blinks.

“Okay. I’ll just…wait here, then.”

Dean shrugs, unbuckling her seatbelt and climbing out of the car. But then she stops. Sighs. Turns back and leans down into the driver’s side.

“Dude, you can’t just sit in the car staring straight ahead all night. Why don’t you…I dunno. Go do something? Fly around, stretch your wings.”

“My wings aren’t physical manifestations. They do not require—“

“Never mind,” Dean interrupts quickly, feeling like an idiot. As far as her experience goes, Cas’s wings are probably made of shadows and lightning. She really ought to have known better.

“Just…come inside, okay. You can stand in the corner or something. Just don’t get all in my face while I’m sleeping. It’s creepy.”

Castiel climbs out of the car, brow furrowed with confusion, and follows her into the motel and up the stairs.

When Dean opens her eyes, she knows immediately that something is wrong. The room is cold, and permeated with a mixed smell of sulfur and burning flesh. She sits up and looks around wildly, the gun she keeps stashed under her pillow at the ready in her hands.

There’s no one there.

“Cas?”

No answer.

“Cas!” She kicks away the covers and pulls on the jeans puddled by the bed one-handed without putting down her gun. The room feels strangely open in spite of the locked door and window, and there’s a deadly sort of quiet beyond its walls…no traffic, none of the noises that should go with early morning in Kansas City. And Castiel is nowhere to be seen.

She fell asleep almost immediately last night, more exhausted than she’d realized until she was horizontal.

Dean sidles up to the window and peers cautiously out between the yellowing blinds at the street below. All the air is punched from her chest in a horrified exhale.

The sprawling, relatively tidy city she drove into last night is gone, obliterated. There seems to be nothing left but the burned out shells of buildings and scattered debris. Mingling with the nearly overpowering smells of sulfur and cooking bodies is a sickly sweet, metallic trace of fresh blood.

She reels back from the window, chest rising and falling rapidly with her panicked breath.

“What the hell. What the _fucking_ hell. Cas, where are you? Where am _I_?”

It’s a nightmare. That’s what she tells herself when she finds the wreckage of Bobby’s wheelchair in the cold husk of what used to be his house. That’s what she repeats over and over when she wakes up in some freak show post-apocalyptic survivalist camp and comes face to face with their fearless leader: Castiel, hard-eyed and fallen and for all intents and purposes, human. The whole thing—Zachariah, this hellhole, and this version of Cas especially. It’s too tailor-made to be anything else. Zachariah cooked this whole thing up, just to terrify her into compliance.

“Future” Cas smells of sweat-saturated denim and whiskey, blood and gunpowder. There are bags under his flinty blue eyes and lines on his face that weren’t there when Dean looked at him last. He moves different, less stiffly. He’s more at home in a human body. He kneels down in front of her and grips her face in one scarred, calloused hand, glares into her eyes and questions her in a voice that promises pain if he doesn’t like her answers. This Castiel knows violence in a way hers never has: blood spatter and the crunch of bones, no pretty light shows or tragic, unmarked corpses with grace-shadow wings scorched into the ground.

She keeps telling herself it’s a bad dream right up to the moment they bring her face to face with herself, and then Dean’s mind stops granting her the mercy of denial. This isn’t a dream; this is the future. _Her_ future. It just so happens to also be all her worst nightmares come true at once.

It isn’t that she can’t imagine herself like this: a gaunt, pitiful heap of shivering limbs curled up in the darkest corner she can find, shrinking from light and noise and human touch, muttering nonsense and “Sam” and “Lucifer” and—Dean thinks she might be sick—begging Michael to take her, then screaming her head off for Castiel.

Cas’s gentleness doesn’t surprise her, either, not exactly. The way the hard lines of his face soften and collapse into kindness stretched over barely-concealed pain at the sight of her future self, the way he kneels down beside her and opens his arms, and waits patiently for her to crawl into them. She melts into his touch as reflexively as she jerks away from everything else, and only when he’s completely wrapped around her does her trembling cease. He presses his face into her hair and whispers something soft and achingly sweet in Enochian, and she whispers something else back against his collarbone.

And it’s that, finally, that Dean has to turn away from. It’s that which convinces her this can’t possibly be a dream. She would never dream something like this for herself. Freezing up, breaking down under pressure? Sure, she has that nightmare on a semi-regular basis. But being held? Being told her utter failure is okay, by an angel of the goddamned Lord no less? Her own subconscious would never let her off that easy.

When Castiel finds her later, out by the rotting husk of the Impala, she’s shaking a little herself. Not just from the cold. He offers her nothing, and she’s glad because while the Dean of the future may be a broken, pitiable child, the Dean she is right now doesn’t deserve any of that. She’s the one who will apparently let this all happen. It’s her fault Cas is fallen and the world has gone to shit.

“She was so stubborn…so strong,” he says quietly. Dean can’t look at him, focuses on the rusted hull of the car she’s leaning against instead. It should hurt more to see it like this, but there’s no room for more hurt in her.

“It was….what happened to Sam. That finally broke her.”

Dean closes her eyes. She was wrong.

“What happened to Sam.”

“He said yes to Lucifer. In Detriot, not long after the Croats started showing up. The Devil took his vessel, and she…” He swallows, hard, and the gravel in his voice increases. “She just…broke. Right up until that moment, she was our general. She was…incredible. But when they told her about Sam, she just stopped. Dropped everything she was planning, everything she was doing. She walked out our front door and started screaming for Michael, begging him to take her. When she realized…when I told her it was too late, that the angels were gone…it took four of us to hold her down, to stop her from hurting herself.”

His voice is empty, like he’s beyond feeling the pain attached to these memories. She wishes he would shut up, but he keeps going, relentless.

“We keep someone back to watch her when we go out on raids. There’s nothing I can do for her now but try to keep her as safe as I can for as long as we both have left. And I’m no longer sure it’s a kindness.”

Dean doesn’t say anything for a long time. What can she say? How does a person apologize for something they haven’t even done yet? She can’t promise to do better. She’s not going to say yes to Michael. But she has to change this. Somehow, she _has_ to.

“I never meant for us to end up like this, Cas,” she says finally. “You especially.”

“I know,” it’s terse, understanding but unforgiving. “You were always trying to do what you thought was right.”

Something in the sharp tone of his voice finally has her jerking her head up to look at him.

“Yeah, well…your _brothers_ didn’t exactly give me any good options,” she spits back, emphasizing his role in this, his connection to the angels on purpose. She hasn’t wanted to hurt someone like this in a long time, especially not Cas. But this guy is not _her_ Cas. And if she has anything to say about it, he never will be.

Instead of looking wounded, though, there’s a triumph in his eyes, the set of his jaw. He pushes out of his lounge and turns to face her. There’s a heat in his glance that resonates against her skin, creeping up her neck, prickling on her scalp.

“Dean,” he says, and it knots up her stomach. He doesn’t look like her Cas and he doesn’t act like her Cas, but oh god, he still _sounds_ like her Cas, and her name rumbling jagged through the glass-and-gravel of that voice, the well-remembered hint of desperation she never quite understood when her Cas called on her before. _Now_ she understands, and something clicks into place. Something he said earlier that got lost in all the horror that surrounded it.

_Our front door._

“Oh, holy fuck,” she breathes, feeling gut-punched for what has to be the tenth time since she woke up in 2014. The smile that springs to life on Cas’s face is unnerving, and intriguing.

“Not anymore, I’m afraid,” he says, and it’s the most human and least like Cas he’s sounded so far. Her Cas doesn’t crack jokes. _Then again, my Cas isn’t_ sleeping _with me either. Jesus Christ._

She should walk away right now, go back to her designated cabin and wait for Zach to zap her back to 2009. But Castiel’s gaze is heavy on her, and something in his eyes is half-begging her, and she realizes that Cas, her Cas, has never really _begged_ her for anything before. And if he did, she’d be in serious trouble.

She’s going back to 2009. None of this is ever going to happen. Which means before long, this Castiel will never even have existed, in the strictest sense. She takes a step forward, placing herself squarely in Cas’s personal space. She looks up at him, grinning feebly.

“I am so going straight back to Hell for this,” she says softly. Future Cas huffs a laugh.

“I’ve really missed your inappropriately timed and sacrilegious sense of humor,” he says, leaning in and down. Dean realizes, a fraction of a second too late, that this _is_ still her Castiel, in all the ways that matter, underneath all the dirt and damage. She doesn’t have time to care before his lips and hands are on her, and after that she has no inclination.

She wakes to a horribly familiar sound. That’s her voice outside, begging in that broken tone. Then what she’s _saying_ registers, and Dean’s blood turns to ice in her veins.

“Sammy. Sammy, you’re alive…you’re alive.” She’s sobbing out the words. Dean clambers out of the makeshift bed, glad she’d had the sense to sleep fully clothed, and runs for the door, not bothering not to make any noise. After all, if that’s who she thinks it is, walking among them, there’s no silence or darkness that could hide her for long.

_How did he get this close without anyone hearing? Where is everybody? Where is Cas?_

She risks a glance outside.

It’s early dawn, and the camp is almost empty. Her future self’s wailing rings out in the unnatural silence, echoing hollowly off the trees. The sunrise reflects off the thick morning fog, staining it deep red. And standing in the midst of it is Lucifer himself, Sam’s body dressed all in white and shining with furious triumph.

The others must have fled. Or perhaps he killed them as they slept, silently, one by one. But… _where are you, Castiel?_ He left her last night, she knew, to go sit beside her future self. Guarding her while she slept. She can’t make herself believe that he would have left her behind. No…he would have died protecting her, however hopeless. Which means Castiel is dead.

Lucifer looks down at the cringing, crying girl on the ground, her hands raised to him, clenching and splaying as though she isn’t sure whether she should be reaching for him or warding off a blow. His lips twist in disgust. He flicks his hand, and she’s gone.

Not dead. _Gone._ There’s no scream of pain, no resounding crack of bone. She simply ceases to exist, and where she was the fog seems thicker. Suddenly, horribly, Dean understands.

It’s blood. The blood of every person in the camp, except for her. The blood of Castiel. And Lucifer, standing in the middle of it, spotless. Wearing her brother’s face and smiling serenely.

A quiet rage like nothing she’s ever felt before steals through her. She goes for the door, pushes it open. Lucifer’s head jerks toward her.  His eyes take her in. His smile widens. He raises his hand—

She made this future. She ended the world. Everything and everyone she loved is dead, and the Devil walks the earth, obliterating humanity and smiling her brother’s smile.

Dean closes her eyes.

Dean opens her eyes.

It’s nighttime on a quiet street, the reassuring yellow glow of a street lamp creating a circle of light around her. The air is cool and smells like cut grass. The mist in the air is not blood. There’s a warm hand on her shoulder. She turns.

Castiel is looking at her with soft, worried eyes.

“Cas,” she gasps out. “Shit, I’m glad to see you. What happened?”

“Zachariah brought help. I was…detained. I got away.”

Dean grins. “Of course you did.” She reaches for him on instinct, then stops herself, hands braced against his shoulders, holding herself back from pulling him in. He tilts his head. Looks confused. Her smile aches.

“Cas,” she starts, and then she can’t seem to find how to go on. He just questions her quietly with his eyes, not pressing.

“Thanks,” she finishes finally. “Just…thanks…for being you.”

He returns her smile tentatively, still not understanding but seeming pleased nonetheless. It reminds her of another smile, on an older version of this face. She drops her hands and turns away.

“C’mon,” she says. “Let’s get back to my car. We got a devil to kill, but first…there’s somethin’ else I gotta do.”

She pulls the cell phone out of her pocket. In 2014 there were no more working cell towers, but in 2009 she has three bars, and no excuses.

It’s time to call Sam.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, it took far too long to update this. I can't promise I'll do any better, but I WILL keep updating it until it's finished.


	19. Thirty-One: Swan Song

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two siblings fight on a field of buried bones. Their blows create thunderclaps. Their world is ending.

On November 2, 1983, Deanna Winchester was carried from her burning house under her father's arm, her eyes stinging with tears and smoke and her infant brother's screams in her ears, mingling with the roar of the fire at their backs.

That moment changed her life forever. Her father, broken by the tragedy of his wife's death, began a quest to avenge her that day. He sought to hunt down and kill the demon that took her from him, from her two small children. His younger child, Sam, he trained. But his daughter, Deanna? For a long time, John didn't know what to do with her.

But he should have tried harder. He should have done better. Because Deanna Winchester would turn out to be the most important girl--the most important _person_ \--in pretty much the whole universe.

She refused to be sidelined while her father and brother fought the good fight without her. She taught herself everything she could about Supernatural lore. She trained herself, pushed herself, cajoled and blackmailed her father and her various other caretakers throughout the years into teaching her whenever she could. Until finally, her father could no longer ignore her. Until her destiny was forced to take note of her as well.

I guess that's where this story began.

And here's where it ends.

* * *

 

She walks outside to see Sam leaning against the hood of the Impala, looking off into the distance. He looks so much older than he did this time last year, his shoulders slumped against the heavy burden he carries, the one Dean let him carry alone for far too long. She hates herself for letting her brother feel this way, like he was the problem, the demon, the freak.

"Hey," Sam says when she approaches, straightening up. She grins and drops the cooler she's carrying, opens it and pulls out two beers. She hands one to Sam and joins him on the hood of the car, taking a long pull from the bottle and fixing her eyes into the same nonspecific distance Sam was just looking into. A world they need to save...a world that will never even know they existed when they're done.

"Dean? What's going on?"

Her mouth feels too dry to speak. She takes another drink before she tries again.

"I'm in."

"In with...?"

"The whole "up with Satan" thing. I'm on board."

Sam looks over at her, incredulous. She returns his gaze steadily, until he blinks and looks back down at the bottle in his hands which he's yet to drink from.

"You're gonna let me say yes?" He sounds disbelieving, and a little sad. Like he thought she would always be there, the one thing standing between him and this, no matter what. But she can't be, not anymore. And she hates it.

"No," she says finally. "That's the thing. It's not...my place to say yes or no. You've always been your own person. If this is what you...want. If this is what you need to do, I got your back."

"That's...you're the last person I ever expected that from."

"I know. It's not easy. It's been you and me all our lives, us against dad, the world, demons...and I guess...I guess it just makes sense that it'd end that way, too."

"Wait a minute," Sam says, eyes widening. "You're not--"

"Yeah, Sammy. I am." Her tone brooks no argument. "It goes against every fiber I got to watch you do this, so I'm not gonna watch. If you're gonna make this play, I'll be damned if I'm gonna stand by and just watch you do it alone."

"But  _I_ let him out, Dean! I'm the one who's gotta put him back in. This isn't your fight."

Dean's arm jerks out, and the beer bottle shatters against the nearest tree. She turns on Sam, green eyes blazing.

"You're damn right it's not my fight! It's not your fight, either! Nobody ought to have to do the shit we do, see the things we see. Nobody! What'd we do to deserve this? Nothing! But if you've deciding you're gonna do it anyway, then goddammit, so am I!"

Sam just looks at her for a moment.

"Thank you," he says at last. Dean doesn't say you're welcome.

They're both freaks, the pair of them. Just because Sam drew the demon and she drew the angel, that doesn't make her any better. Any different. She understands that now. She's just as much the key to taking the world to hell as he is, at the end of the day.

And therefore, it's just as much her job to stop it.

* * *

 

They drive all night. They don't tell Bobby where they're going, or even that they're going. The ride is long, and tense, and silent. There's half a dozen milk jugs full of demon blood in the trunk, squeezed in among all the holy water and graveyard dirt and Dean's favorite sawed-off shotgun.

Neither of them make any decision out loud, but the road draws them inexorably to the cemetery outside Lawrence, Kansas. Dean puts the car in park and turns to look over at Sam, memorizing this image of him in the passenger's seat, the way he's been for the last five years: her little brother, always at her elbow.

There's a flutter of wings, and she looks up to see a ruffled, sad-eyed angel in her rearview mirror.

"Dean, Sam. You have to stop. We'll find another way."

"We already talked about it, Cas," Dean says, tired of this argument already, before it's even started. "This is the way me and Sammy found." She turns the car off and gets out, slamming the door probably harder than necessary behind her. She tries not to think about her car, her Baby, being left out here in a cemetery, in the rain. Maybe Cas'll take it. It's not like he has much in the way of flying power anymore. It probably took all his juice for the week just to get him here. She feels guilty; she should have just brought him along, so he'd be able to fly away from the shit storm when the time came.

Speaking of Cas, he's following after her, still talking.

"Dean, please. Listen to me!" He grabs her arm and spins her around to look at him.

"Cas, stop! It's no good, okay? It's no good." She's fighting the stinging in her eyes. She's never been a crier, and she's not about to start now.

"If you'll just give us a little more time," he says softly, sadly, but she can hear in his voice that he's giving up. He doesn't have the power to stop her anymore. She tries to give him a smile, but it's sad.

"You know, Cas...when Zach kidnapped me awhile back, he showed me a future where we were together, for awhile. But in the end it all burned to the ground, and you died trying to keep my worthless hide intact." She makes herself reach out, even though it doesn't come easily to her anymore, even though it's been longer than she wants to think about since she touched someone, held someone, for any reason other than death, and violence. His face feels strange in her hands, and his eyes look confused more than anything. But she needs this. She needs to say goodbye.

"You were sad. You were broken, and hopeless, and waiting for death. And I'm not gonna let that happen to you. To anybody. I'm gonna make your future right."

Cas just keeps looking at her, as if he's trying to understand. Maybe he can't understand. The thought hurts. But the Cas who could...he wasn't  _her_ Cas. He was a Cas broken by love and loss. Maybe, if this Cas loses before he learns to love, he can heal. Maybe he can even be an angel again, build a better Heaven.

"You're the closest thing I've ever had to a best friend," she says. "Wherever I end up after this...I'm gonna miss you." And then, because a hug doesn't seem to quite cut it, she pulls him in and plants a kiss on his mouth.

When she pulls back he looks stricken, like he finally gets that this is goodbye.

"Dean...please--"

"'Bye Cas." And she turns to where her brother is waiting, hands in his pockets and looking pointedly down at the ground by the car.

* * *

 

Two siblings fight on a field of buried bones. Their blows create thunderclaps. Their world is ending.

Behind their stone-set faces the true owners of the bodies are screaming. Their battle is a silent struggle of wills, and they are losing. They are losing badly.

Dean sees Sam in front of her, eyes hard and determined as his fists come toward her again and again. Sam sees Dean across from him, her face bleeding and broken, her jaw set, eyes unwavering and full of disgust as she takes blow after blow, and trades him one for each.

Behind them, unnoticed, a broken angel crawls from under the half-crushed Impala, and with nearly the last of his waning strength, throws four joined rings down onto the yellow grass. A cold, sour wind picks up. The angel lays his head down, closes his eyes. He's done all he can. The rest is up to her...up to them.

Two siblings fight for one another with all they have, and at last it's Sam who manages to push the devil backward, just for a moment. Just long enough for Dean to do the same. One moment they're trapped, and the next they're in each other's arms, bloodied and aching and barely holding onto their own wills for dear life.

"It's okay, Dean," Sam gasps. "It's gonna be okay. I've got him."

Dean nods. "Me too, me too. For now. You ready, little brother?"

He grips her hand, tight. "Ready."

Together, they turn toward the dark, gaping portal. Together they run for the edge. And together, they go over the side.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There may be one more chapter, an epilogue, before I'm done with this one.


	20. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam stares down at the rough-hewn stone marker Bobby scraped together for her and blinks back once more the tears he refuses to allow himself to shed. Five hundred miles away, Dean wakes up in a strange hotel room, alone.

_Here lies Deanna Winchester_

_Beloved Sister, Righteous Woman_

_January 24, 1979 – May 2, 2008_

_September 18, 2008 – May 13, 2010_

_May She Be At Peace_

* * *

 

Thirty-one. That’s how old Deanna Winchester is when she dies for the second time. Sam stares down at the rough-hewn stone marker Bobby scraped together for her and blinks back once more the tears he refuses to allow himself to shed. There’s no body buried there, and even if there had been, Sam knows it would be empty now. If he’s back, then somewhere so is Dean. He doesn’t need to see her to know; he can just feel it, down to his bones he _knows._ Dean is out there, somewhere. And Sam is going to find her.

* * *

 

_Endings are hard._

Sam spends the next year of his life chasing the ghost of his sister. He takes jobs he knows Dean wouldn’t be able to pass up, goes to landmarks he knows Dean’s always wanted to see. He calls every cell number they’ve ever had and leaves messages on all the ones that still have mailboxes. He jumps at the sight of every old, black muscle car he sees. But it’s never her.

Finally, it’s Dean who finds him, in a seedy old motel outside of Kermit, Texas. He wakes from a fitful sleep to the achingly familiar sound of an old ’67 Impala motor, accelerating just outside his window and fading swiftly into the distance. He’s out of bed so fast he nearly falls over, running to the door and flinging it open, squinting desperately into the darkness for a glimpse of those red taillights. But there’s nothing to see. Whoever they were, they’re gone.

Sam closes the door and throws himself back onto the bed, awake now and jittery but also exhausted and heartsick. He rolls onto his stomach, determined to get a few more hours of sleep. He reaches over to switch out his sweaty pillow for the cooler, unused one on the other side of the bed…and that’s when he finds the letter.

It’s in a plain white envelope, unmarked and unsealed. The letter is handwritten, and the sight of that spiky, messy, uneven hand is enough to bring a lump to Sam’s throat. He reads.

 

> _Hey Sammy,_
> 
> _Sorry to drop in on you like this. I know you’re probably wondering why I haven’t come to find you before now.  The truth is, I’ve been afraid that if we’re in the same room at the same time for too long, whatever miracle it was that pulled us out of the frying pan will break, and we’ll be right back in the fire where we started, fighting against a destiny I know neither of us want._
> 
> _But I finally realized that it’s unfair to you, to keep hiding and not at least give you a reason why. So that’s why I’m writing you this: to tell you why, and to beg you to give me a little time, just a little time to take care of a few things._
> 
> _When you and I went our separate ways after the horsemen started showing up, Zach grabbed me from a motel room and dragged me into the future, to 2014. He showed me a world that was dying…a world where you and I failed, where you were the devil and Bobby was dead, and Cas…Cas was just broken._
> 
> _I wanna believe it wasn’t real, that it was just one of Zach’s fake-outs, cooked up to scare me into playing along with our “destiny.” I hope even if it was real, that what you and I did already stopped it from coming true. But the thing is, Sam, I just don’t know. And I’m afraid of that future._
> 
> _So I’m gonna keep my distance, at least for now. I’m gonna help Cas clean up Heaven and hunt down demons. And when I’m sure, really sure, that future isn’t coming for us, we’ll be a family again._
> 
> _I love you, little brother. See you in 2015._
> 
> _Dean_

 

Sam lets the tears he’s held back for months fall onto the paper, causing the ink to splotch and bleed together in places. He folds up the letter and puts it in his pocket. He doesn’t sleep for the rest of the night, but when the sun comes up he showers, shaves, and shreds all his fake IDs and credit cards. He decides to look for a job.

What he finds is a dog in the path of his car, and a prickly veterinarian named Amelia.

* * *

 

_You try to tie up every loose end, but you never can._

Deanna Winchester wakes up in a hotel room.  She sits up groggily and look around, shading her eyes from the sun coming in through the curtains. She doesn’t know how she got here, or where exactly here even is. There’s an ugly, scratchy comforter underneath her and a persistent and annoying dripping noise coming from the generation direction of the bathroom. Other than that, the room is utterly silent.

She’s alone, and the stab of disappointment she feels at that realization is sharp, and hot. It had never occurred to her that she might wake up, but if it had she would have hoped to find someone waiting for her when she did.

Sliding to the edge of the bed, she drags herself to her feet slowly and drifts toward the curtains, glancing surreptitiously out the window at the dirt-and-gravel parking lot.

There, shining black in the sun without a dent on her, is Dean’s Baby. And leaning against the hood, squinting against the bright morning sunlight…is Cas.

She can’t fight the grin that she feels spreading across her face. Without pausing to think, she throws herself at the door and crosses to the car, stopping just before she comes within arm’s reach.

He’s still in that same suit, same crooked tie, same ridiculous trench coat. His hair looks like he’s put a fork in a light socket. She takes one small step toward him and then another, approaching with caution, not quite ready to believe. Her legs lock her into place two steps away, refusing to go any further, unsure of her reception.

“Hi Cas,” she breathes. A small smile breaks across his face, and his blue eyes almost seem to sparkle as he answers.

“Hello, Dean.”

She can’t seem to think of anything else to say. She has so many questions—how, mainly, and why. But all she wants to do is look at him, just for this first minute.

Cas tilts his head to the side, considering. Then he closes the distance between them and, cautiously, as though he’s never done this before (come to think of it, he probably hasn’t), he extends his arms and slowly, haltingly closes them around her in what has to be the world’s most hesitant, awkward hug. Dean closes her eyes and returns his embrace, even buries her face in the stupid coat. It feels—no pun intended—like Heaven.

That thought brings her up short, and she pulls back slowly, keeping Cas’s elbows under her hands as though she’s afraid he’ll fly off if she lets go of him for a second. _Well,_ she thinks, _maybe I am. Could anyone blame me?_

“Cas,” she begins carefully, unsure of how exactly to ask her question. “Are we…am I…is this my…Heaven?”

The effect that simple question has on Cas’s face is incredible. His blue eyes go wide as saucers and his face actually goes slightly red. Dean can only stare; she’s never known an angel to blush before.

“Dean...would you expect to see me, in your Heaven?”

And something clicks, some threadbare memory from what seems like a lifetime ago, but in reality was less than six months before. Ash, in his very own jerry-rigged Heaven, explaining that certain people can share each other’s Heaven. Only one kind, that he knew of, actually. Soulmates.

Dean feels her face warming at the implication. But she doesn’t step back from Cas or play it off as a misunderstanding. She may not have meant to say it quite that way, but that doesn’t make it any less true. She can’t imagine a world, or a Heaven, without Castiel. Without Castiel, and also—

“Sam!”

She looks around, as if expecting him to be there in all his over-tall, giraffe-limbed glory. When he doesn’t materialize, she looks back at Cas.

“Sammy?” She asks him, a hint of panic creeping into her voice. Cas grips her arms, a steadying gesture.

“Sam is fine. He’s out, as well. Just…not here.”

“Why not here?” Dean asks, incredulous. Then she stops. Somehow, she doesn’t need him to answer. She knows.

“The angels aren’t happy with us for stopping their doomsday plan, are they.” It isn’t a question, but Cas shakes his head anyway.

“And you kept us separate in order to shield us from them better?”

“Well…in a way, yes.” Cas says, sounding sorry. She doesn’t want him to be sorry. He’s given up so much for them, protected them—not just Dean and Sam, the whole _world_ —against his own family, because it was the right thing to do.  Dean knows she’d never make the same choice. Going together was one thing, but if it came down to a _choice_ between Sam and the world, she’d choose Sammy. Every time.

Which is why she’s suddenly glad he’s nowhere to be found. For the first time in a long time, maybe since he left for Stanford, she doesn’t need to see him to know he’s okay. She can feel the truth of what Cas tells her. Sam is alive, and here, and just fine. He’ll figure things out without her around to tell him what to do. And in the meantime…

“Okay, so…what’re you gonna do now?”

Cas considers for a moment. “I haven’t thought about it. If it were possible, I would like to return to Heaven, I suppose.”

She feels another stab of disappointment, but before it can go too deep, Cas goes on.

“Long enough to make sure no one realizes you’re both out of the pit. I’ve concealed you from the other angels, and made sure there are no others of the Winchester bloodline within the angels’ reach any longer. All the same, I wish I had enough power left to get a sense of Raphael’s plans.”

“Okay…well I dunno, maybe we can figure out a way for you to do that. And then? What’ll you do after?” She doesn’t dare let herself hope.

“Then…” Cas considers her for a moment. “Do you intend to continue hunting?”

“I...” She considers. “I haven’t really thought about it. But I mean…it’s not like I know how to do a whole lot else.”

Cas nods, and then turns and heads for the passenger side of the car. Dean takes the cue and jumps eagerly into the driver’s seat, reveling in the feel of the leather seat, the familiar dashboard, the steering wheel in her hands. She’s so happy to be back behind the wheel for a moment that it doesn’t immediately register that Cas hasn’t answered her question.

“Okay buddy,” she says once she’s gotten comfortable. “You gotta interpret that nod for me.”

“If you wish you continue hunting…I will come with you. After I have concealed the remains of my fading grace from the angels.”

Dean feels a stab of fear as she realizes that their miraculous return hasn’t given Cas his mojo back. She turns her head to look at him, really look beyond just her euphoria at seeing him here and alive. He’s slumped in the seat a bit, and there are dark circles under his eyes. He has a day’s worth of stubble on his cheeks and he looks…tired. It reminds her far too much of another Castiel, from another future. One she’d just as soon avoid.

“Cas…” she says slowly, “what about Heaven? You just gonna let Raphael run things? Don’t you want to get your grace back? There’s gotta be a way to do that, right?”

Cas fixes her with a look that is equal parts irritation and puzzlement.

“I don’t understand,” he says. “You say you wish for me to go back to Heaven and deal with Raphael, despite the fact that this would separate us and likely end in either my death or the start of a celestial civil war. Possibly both. And yet you seemed so disappointed a moment ago, when you thought I was leaving.”

“Cas, I…”

“Do you want me to stay or not, Dean?” And it’s so truculent, so reminiscent of Cas just before the end, the real end in _this_ timeline…on a _bender_ of all things, that she almost has to laugh.

“I want you to stay,” she says finally.

“Then I’ll stay.”

“Good,” she says, squeezing his hand. She allows herself a moment to just drink in the sight of him, sitting pretty in the passenger seat, ready to follow her anywhere. Then she turns and, finding the keys in the ignition, cranks the car and pulls out of the motel parking lot, onto the road.

“So eventually you’re gonna have to explain to me how all this happened…me…Sam…the car…but first thing’s first. The rules.”

Cas casts a puzzled side-eye her way, complete with furrowed brow. “Rules?”

“Yeah, man…you gonna ride with me, the car has rules.”

Cas seems to consider this for a moment before nodding. “Okay…I will try to remember. What are the rules.”

“Well, rule number one,” Dean says, grinning over at him. “Driver picks the music. Shotgun…”She stops, eyes softening, remembering a day much like this one, years before.

“Shotgun,” she continues, voice gone a little husky. “Gets occasional veto power. Just don’t abuse it.”

Her new copilot nods solemnly, and Dean laughs and reaches for the dial. She tunes quickly through the stations until she finds one that plays classic rock, an old song by Kansas that she hasn’t heard in ages. She listens to the lyrics, and can’t help but smile.

* * *

 

_So what’s it all add up to? It’s hard to say. But me, I’d say this was a test…for Sam and Dean, and Castiel as well. And I think they did all right._

_Up against good, evil, angels, devils, destiny, family, and God himself, they made their own choice. They chose each other. They chose to find a way to be happy._

_And well…isn’t that kinda the whole point?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And...that's the end. I hope, if you've been reading this since the beginning, that you enjoy it and aren't too disappointed at the way it turned out. To be honest, this isn't where I saw this ending when I started writing it, and I actually didn't intend it to go all Destiel at the end there, either. But, well...in a perfect world where writers write things that make narrative sense, I can't see Dean, whether it's canon Dean or our girl here, ever leaving hunting, and I can't see Sam choosing freely to stay in the life, given any other option.
> 
> And...I also can't see Dean and Cas choosing to stay apart, whether one or both of them is a different gender or not, whether they're friends, lovers, partners, siblings-in-arms. It doesn't matter. For me, Dean and Cas will always end up riding off into the sunset together, heading for their next job. And Sam will find a nice girl that he cares about and settle down to have a normal life.
> 
> And there will always be Kansas on the radio.


End file.
